[M3devel] LONGINT

[Tony Hosking]

I've successfully bootstrapped a CM3 compiler that supports LONGINT  
as a 64-bit integer type (equivalent to "long long" in C) in addition  
to INTEGER (same as "long" in C).  This will be useful for  
simplifying interfaces to C library routines that expect to be able  
to treat 64-bit integers such as "off_t" for lseek, etc.

Currently, the compiler does not treat LONGINT as an ordinal type  
(I'm not sure this would ever be a good idea) so it cannot be used to  
index arrays, define enumerations etc., though the simple operations  
ABS, MAX, MIN, addition, comparisons, MOD, multiplication,  
subtraction, assignment, are all supported.  This includes changes to  
m3core (with support for Long.T similar to Word.T, plus RTTipe and  
RTTypeMap, etc.) and libm3 for Pickle2, as well as to m3middle,  
m3front, and the gcc-based compiler backend.  There is still work  
that needs to be done to support and test all the other M3 tools such  
as network objects, etc., with support and testing needed in m3tk for  
the new type, as well as in other tools like m3browser.

How best should I proceed to get this out to the community.  I am  
tempted to push it into the CVS head just so that it gets some  
testing, but perhaps that is premature. I can confirm a complete  
bootstrap via "do-cm3-std.sh" that appears to produce perfectly  
functional executables, including mentor, etc.