Re: External (C++) interfaces

[acken@informatik.uni-kl.de]

   Date: Fri, 1 Dec 95 08:18:36 EST
   From: Mike Griebling <grieblm@trt.allied.com>

   I also would like to define some interfaces to C++ classes.

Umpf.  I don't have much experience with C++, but someone told me that
C++ uses the standard C linker to put programs together.  That means
that C++ maps any function (even overloaded ones) to a unique name.
This is (probably) accomplished by converting each function parameter 
(ie, its type) into a string and appending them to the functions name.
You would need to know the scrambling function that builds the linker
names.  I don't think that this function is the same for any two
different C++ compilers.  

Note that this doesn't even take element function of classes into
account.

My suggestion: Don't do this, forget about it, leave it alone, save
mankind. 

   [...]

   In general, our life would be a lot simpler if our compiler supported
   structured returns.  

I'm not so keen on language extensions.  If we start a discussion
about it: I have two pet extensions of my own (concatenation of string
constants and interface types a la Objective-C)... ;-)

-- mva