Re: Factory Pattern

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:54:34 -0700, Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> On 28 Lip, 00:23, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> 
>> (New standards for other languages also will have to add
>> this sort of support, or take their chances at having their standards fail.)
> 
> When I think about it more, I cannot even believe it might be true.
> Consider... C. It has the ISO standard and surely will be revised.
> 
> One of the things that are taken for granted in the whole industry is
> the fact that C names are immediately "extern" without any further
> tweaking. Thanks to this you can write
> 
> pragma Import (C, Puts, "puts");
> 
> and gain access to the standard puts function in C. Or any other.
> *Every* programming language that is even remotely useful uses this
> fact and relies on it.
> 
> Now imagine that C introduces support for Unicode in names. In order
> to reuse the whole existing infrastructure of binary utilities (the
> tradition that is hard to drop) it would be necessary to introduce
> name mangling that will translate Unicode identifiers into something a
> typical linker can understand. But that will not be standardized,
> leading to complete mess. The alternative would be to require that the
> whole world starts to understand Unicode in symbol names for linking
> and import/export. The implications for the industry would be
> disastrous.
> 
> My humble opinion: there will be no Unicode allowed for C identifiers
> and the binary symbol names will stay Latin1 (or even a subset of it)
> till the end of the world as we know it. This means that ISO cannot
> have any reasonable mandate to enforce Unicode support on other
> languages without the risk of undermining its credibility by being
> inconsistent.
> 
> Am I missing something?

Hmm, AFAIK both C and C++ always mangled external names:

"_puts" not "puts" in C.

"??00puts@t346�$____�&G_Fsdf..." in C++.

Usability is nobody's care, anyway. Just try to link Borland C++ to a MSVC
import library, you'll see.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de