Re: OOC Core Library

[Frank Copeland <fjc@wossname.apana.org.au>]

Sander wrote:

> - RTS (access to the commandline and starting a program)
>   - argument separators should be parsed according to system
>     conventions ( -, / etc). The argument separators should be
>     invisible. A program should supply a list of acceptable
>     argument names.

An Unix-style argv argument list is certainly possible under AmigaOS (and I
have implemented one already for my port) but it doesn't follow the AmigaOS
style guidelines. AmigaOS argument lists consist of keywords or
keyword/value pairs that are parsed by OS routines according to a template
provided by the program. It would be good if some way of abstracting
arguments could be found that allowed native conventions to be used.

>   - arguments are read-only.
>   - Called programs are not dynamically linked with the calling
>     program.

I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean called programs should run
asynchronous to the caller? This isn't appropriate for the use it will be
put to, which is to run the RCS to check out a source file before compiling
it.

> I also think we need a runtime linker/loader like the module
> 'Module' in the Oberon system. Otherwise the advantages of
> dynamically linked modules are lost. Whether a port supports
> it is another matter. This is useful when one wants to build
> a cross-compiler, and it is a big plus for Oberon-2 compared
> to C++.

This will most certainly be a feature of my backend. ETH is releasing the
Oberon System V4 sources, and I plan to base my dynamic loader on these.

Frank