FFI Report, CVS Id 1.4

[Alastair David Reid]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> Would anyone really use explicit "static"?

I would.  

Even if rarely used, I think it is easier to teach people to use it if
we say there are two forms of definition (safe and unsafe, static and
dynamic, etc.) and then later teach them that one of them is the
default if they say nothing.

It also provides people with the right vocabulary for distinguishing
two variants.  With the old ffi, we had "foreign export dynamic" and
"foreign export" but "foreign export" is ambiguous because you might
want to use it to include "foreign export dynamic" or you might want
to exclude "foreign export dynamic".  We all solved that problem by
talking about "foreign export static" but this was a slightly funny
construction because you couldn't write "static" in actual ffi code.

-- 
Alastair Reid        reid at cs.utah.edu        http://www.cs.utah.edu/~reid/