Library archives

[Alastair Reid]

SimonM:
> We had a long discussiong about this a while back (sorry for
> sounding like a broken record!), 

The questions that come up as I implement the ffi are mostly things
that are not clear from the spec.  This is a particularily good
example of that - there's no example and the explanation is brief and
open to many interpretations.  I could hunt through the archives and
guess at what the final decision was or I could ask for clarification
so that we all agree on what change is needed to the report (or I look
foolish when the appropriate section of the report is pointed out to
me).

In this case, all I could find was a brief discussion with no final
conclusion.  (Or maybe I missed the conclusion - the subject lines one
the messages are fairly uninformative so I skimmed old mail fairly
quickly.)


> where some people argued that libraries should be specified in the
> FFI declaration in the source code, and some people (inc. me) argued
> that libraries should be kept out of the source code altogether, on
> the grounds that they were too system-dependent and it would be
> impossible to write portable code without resorting to CPP.  There
> were other reasons, but I can't remember them all now.

The more I look at it, the more I agree with you.