Re: Multi language programming

guerin@IRO.UMontreal.CA (Frederic Guerin) writes:
...
>Can it be assumed that for a given modular language like C, FORTRAN, MODULA
>the naming and calling convention is unique for a given platform/machine ?


No; there have historically been many cases where more than one
Fortran compiler was available for a machine and they were not
equivalent from this POV (f77 and XL-Fortran on IBM 6150 boxes
in the late '80s-early '90s were the specific example I got my
first silvery hairs struggling with -- but the Fortran situation in
the DOS PC world around the same time was even more chaotic!).


>How A should be designed to handle such a situation ?


I would suggest named "attribute sets" allowing machine-specific
and compiler-specific descriptions of name mangling, parameter
passing conventions, etc. Look at the WATCOM C compilers that
are available for several PC-oriented OS's; their pragmas, at
least since release 9.0, are I think admirable in the flexibility
they offer in this respect, and they come with named descriptions
for some other languages/compilers one might need to interface to
(and the flexibility to add further descriptions for langs/comps
not included in the supplied named-sets).


Not an ideal solution, but this is far from an ideal situation
that one is struggling with...




Alex
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Email: martelli@cadlab.it Phone: +39 (51) 597313
CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Ronzani 7/29, Casalecchio, Italia Fax: +39 (51) 597120
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