On Sep 16, 2009, at 11:14 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
it is correct that alien touches the parser?
The declarations are not pragmas compliant.
Yes -- there's a hack in there that allows an error code variable to
be passed in the <primitive> pragma where otherwise the parser would
expect a literal.
Of course your suggestion makes sense.
When marcus is back in europe I will check the status of the
new handwritten parser because it would be good to use it.
Thanks Stef. I've got some other ideas for Alien; is this list the
best place to discuss those? Specifically:
* AlienLibrary shouldn't do its cleanup at shutdown, it should do it
at image startup instead. That way a simple image save won't
invalidate all of my external references.
* I'm creating a partial Alien library for GemStone so that I can use
the CairoGraphics package in both Pharo and GLASS. But on x86-64,
there there's a size difference between a pointer/long and an integer.
It'd be nice to have some more explicit APIs on Alien, so I could say
"Alien newCInteger" or "Alien newCLong" and have the platform return
me the proper size Alien. Even without the platform size differences,
it seems awkward to use "Alien newC: 4" everywhere I want an integer,
"Alien newC: 8" where I want a double, etc.
* Similarly, I'd like an API on AlienLibrary that distinguishes
between integers and longs. In the CairoGraphics package I've added
some methods to this effect:
CRLibrary
int: 'cairo_surface_write_to_png'
with: handle
with: string address
or
patternHandle := CRLibrary
pointer: 'cairo_pop_group'
with: handle.
I like the way it reads. And even though on IA32 they both use the
same 4-byte primitive, on x86-64 I could have pointers return an 8-
byte Alien and ints return a 4-byte primitive.
* Same story with the basic data accessors like (un)signedLongAt: --
I'd want to add something like (un)signedIntAt et. al.
Yes, I realize that some of this is overkill for IA32 only, but on the
other hand I think a couple of these intention-revealing changes would
make Alien client code prettier.
Sorry to be so wordy. I'd be glad to do all of the Smalltalk-level
coding on this -- much of it is done already in my image -- but I
thought I'd better ask the maintainer(s) first and this list is the
best forum I've found for Alien issues.
--
Ken Treis
Miriam Technologies, Inc.
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