Re: OOC Core Library

[Mike Griebling <grieblm@trt.allied.com>]

>    Would you know about any standards in this area?  Maybe you could get us
>    started with a set of system flags that we could use in the compiler.
> 
> An outline of how system-flags (I dubbed them type/object modifiers)
> could be implemented can be found in frontend/doc/Modifiers in the ooc
> distrib.  A section of such flags is identified by [...], the location
> of the section determines what Oberon-2 object (ie, a type, a
> variable, a procedure, etc) is modified by them.  It's the back-end's
> task to to parse the stuff inside the brackets.  That means that every
> back-end has full freedom in the choice of its supported flags.

But that kind of anarchy would make code which interfaces to external C
libraries non-portable.  I thought the whole purpose of using these flags
was to make the code portable.  To help this effort along, I suggest that
maybe all the code generators could share a common set of flags that they
all support.  For example, a standard C interface might be:

  PROCEDURE ["C"] FormatString ["sprintf"] 
        (s, template : ARRAY OF CHAR [...]): LONGINT;

Here, the [...] indicates that additional arguments are allowed to be passed.

Michael G.
                                           

> -- mva
>