Re: Compiling, binding, and linking an Ada prog. interfaced with C

[fjh@cs.mu.oz.au (Fergus Henderson)]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

><<As it happens, both ISE Eiffel and Mercury translate to C.  That's
>probably what prompted us to invent the feature in the first place.
>But the feature can be implemented quite easily even in an implementation
>that does not normally translate to C.
>>>
>
>No surprise! Yes, of course this is easy if you translate to C. But let's
>have an example of implementing this where you do NOT translate into C.

Do you mean where you do not translate this construct to C,
or do you mean where the implementation as a whole does not normally
translate things to C?

Of course for this specific construct you need to implement it by
translation to C.  Asking to implement it otherwise would indeed
be unreasonable.  But there's no reason why an implementation
that normally works by compiling directly to assembler or object files
can't handle occurrences of this specific construct by translation to C.

Would you be satisfied with an example of an implementation that
does not normally translate to C++, but allows interfacing to C++ macros?
I don't have one available right now, but one of the other members of
the Mercury team said he would have a go at implementing this at some
time in the future, and I don't expect that it will take him long to
implement once he gets around to it.

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.