Summary of current change suggestions

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Tue, 20 Feb 2001 18:54:05 +0000, malcolm-ffi at cs.york.ac.uk <malcolm-ffi at cs.york.ac.uk> pisze:

> Since I believe backward compatibility is very important, would
> anyone like to either modify Marcin's proposal, or make a new
> concrete proposal that is perhaps slightly more conservative but
> still achieves our goals?

One point: the syntax should be such that adding future languages,
calling conventions, attributes etc. does not break old code which
uses these names as e.g. foreign function names.

Since sets of languages, attributes etc. are open, it's advantageous
when foreign declarations can be parsed without knowledge about
these sets. It's for better error messages ("I don't support calling
convention foo" vs. "parse error"), for the ability to ignore unknown
attributes (should all attributes be ignorable, with a warning? or
should they be explicitly marked as ignorable or not? I think we
may specify that all are ignorable, for simplicity), and for parsing
preprocessors which output foreign declarations unmodified.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak at knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
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QRCZAK