From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b307bd75c8071241 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Assuaging sour grapes :-) [was: newbie Q: storage management] Date: 1997/05/07 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 240084852 References: <5k5hif$7r5@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> <336A065B.41C6@magellan.bgm.link.com> <336E15A4.167E@magellan.bgm.link.com> <5knhge$mul@top.mitre.org> <336FDF8B.73AF@sprintmail.com> <52F0EC12E20AA44E.5796B5986C85CB4B.8C3BF60EE8ED6C1C@library-proxy.airnews.net> <33708E99.2186@sprintmail.com> <3370B12E.499D@sprintmail.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: John Volan says <DLL, couldn't other compilers just do the same?>> Certainly it seems a good idea to try to standardize these things across compilers where possible, but it is a lot of effort to do so (the ARA is one forum for achieving this, and we have had some small successes -- like the agreement on pragma C_Pass_By_Copy). The difficulty is of course that there is a delicate balance between getting agreements and getting good solutions (the C_Pass_By_COpy solution is a kludge, and not a very nice one, but you have to be pragmatic, and Aonix had cut their release with this approach, so we changed GNAT to be compatible, even though we all were not terribly convniced it was the best solution (it's a tough problem -- the ARG is STILL discussing how to best handle it with no approach to an agreement -- and sometimes a kludge is better than a wonderful solution never reached :-) But going back to the COnvention=>DLL, I am not sure that I would immediately want to follow this. I prefer a technical solution where you can build DLL's without having to say anything special at the language level -- right now in GNAT you don't need to say anything special to build a DLL. Furthermore there are differences in what can be put in DLL's, for example, in GNAT there is no difficulty in putting tasks in a DLL. But I really don't know much about the details at all -- just enough to suspect that we don't really know the best way of approaching this problem, and it may be premature to try to standardize.