Re: Should Inline be private in the private part of a package spec?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Monday, August 6, 2012 4:10:08 PM UTC-6, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> On 06.08.12 23:52, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> >> Why you have decided that calling convention is an optinization?
> >
> > What the program does is not a matter of whether or not
> > some subprogram needs calling convention Ada or StdCall or
> > some such. Hence, from the perspective of the caller,
> > knowing the calling convention of an import is distraction
> > at best.
> 
> And, just like it is not normally important to know optimization
> issues when writing a call, it is not important to know
> the convention of an import when writing the call (of the
> Ada subprogram from the package spec). This is why I have
> likened optimization to calling conventions. They share the
> same degree of irrelevance from the caller's perspective.

No, that's not only wrong but _very_ wrong. Conventions are *vital* to a specification. Let us consider just one subprogram:
 Procedure Add(Object : In Out Our_Type; Value : In Integer);

Now with respect to this subprogram if "Pragma Convention( C, Add );" is applied then the parameters are pushed onto the stack Right-to-Left, and the calling-code is to handle cleanup. HOWEVER, if "Pragma Convention( Pascal, Add );" was applied the parameters would be pushed Left-to-Right and the function itself would handle the cleanup.

Even ignoring callee/caller cleanup there's a lot of difference here -- one's stack looks like this:
Object,
Value
The other's like this:
Value,
Object

That is, the convention drastically alters the interface, and is therefore properly placed into the specification (or possibly private section if you're providing an API layer).