[M3devel] "target specific pragmas"?

Wed Feb 13 18:44:31 CET 2008

Jay:

I don't want to be offensive, but quite frankly I'm tired of
continually reading your gripes about Modula-3 as a language and your
pining for C.

This forum is for those people interested in advancing the state of
Modula-3.  We don't care about C/C++/C#/etc in this forum.  Those of us
who are M3 zealots for the most part probably would welcome any move to
divest CM3 of all underpinnings from the C world.

Have you seriously studied the Modula-3 language and used it to build
production software?  I think some of your comments suggest that you are
not a true Modula-3 programmer and that you still cling to the C-way of
doing things rather than embracing the Modula-3 way.

Now, I do think that most people are interested in improving things and
no language is perfect, so any well-thought-out proposal for a change to
the language is welcome for consideration,  But in this mail list forum,
I for one would appreciate less ranting about C and more constructive
Modula-3.

Truly, I do not want to offend you.  Maybe I'm just having a bad day,
but I encourage you to try and focus your posts to the advancement of
Modula-3.

Regards,
Randy

>>> Jay <jayk123 at hotmail.com> 2/12/2008 11:28 PM >>>
 > >My principle concern is that once we provide C APIs then C will 
 > >permeate the M3 space more pervasively (both apps and libraries). 

This is somewhat my point.
When I am debugging, I really miss printf.

The debugging options seem really poor everywhere and esp. on NT386.

gdb has all wierded out variable names for one thing.
And I think we should fix it so that that the symbols have full source
paths.
I realize they would only be correct on one machine, and hopefully
there's a decent story for copying the files.
Yeah, I know about "dir" but haven't yet formed a .gdbinit or whatnot.

Other than printf'ing, I also end up getting a stack in cdb with no
symbols and then disasm in gdb to find what the functions were. That
works fine a few times, but I hope not to do it often. Somewhat lucky I
could even get a stack. Because, see, cdb is nice enough to stop on
access violations by default (such as the time/date code was causing).
gdb has a promising sounding feature, the ability to stop on "signals",
which I think an access violation would count as, oh, but that feature
isn't implemented, sorry. Ok, true, think about it more and I can break
on the toplevel exception handler in cygwin1.dll, not sure that always
works or not, it's an implementation detail, but heck, when you are
debugging, take advantage of whatever you have. :)

RTIO, is too verbose for me.
But darnit, I can't really have printf..puts is about the best I could
do..
Oh, but no, since TEXT != char* even that isn't useful.
fread/fwrite maybe though.

On a different hand (how many are there? :) ), have you looked in
m3core\src\unix?
There is just tons of dead stuff, stuff with comments about it perhaps
being wrong, "use with care".
It seemed to me maybe the point was to expose "all" of /usr/include.
Someone, other than me, sure seems to have gone overboard, like someone
using Ultrix and Linux 1.x, and then it copied around.
Heck, look at the mem* functions being commented out (and probably
using the incorrect type int) because Ultrix or somesuch didn't have
them. I uncommented them to fix a build. And notice that these
functions, again, like most of printf, are /extremely/ portable in
functionality and exact binary interface (yeah yeah, I've heard of bcopy
and bzero).

What there was of Cstdio.i3 seemed very possibly wrong, at least on
many targets, and very doubtfully useful for anything, and I think I've
now shown unused.

 > Y, the easiest way to implement the interface is to call a C
function 
 > that "just happens" to have the correct interface. But on another 

But wrapping everything in Modula-3 is so tedious...
Oh for all languages to just understand C headers so we can stop
rewriting them...
Or some other language, ok...not going to be solved in this forum.
To go the unpopular route (again), MS CLR/.NET among many other things,
attempts to solve this very problem.
One way to describe "interfaces" that "all" languages can
understand...at least for some subset of languages features..

Just as tedious btw, it is often more portable to wrap all the C APIs
in C, exposing a portable controled Modula-3 interface independent of
the precise header content. Like errno and my get_stderr/out/in.

 - Jay

> To: hosking at cs.purdue.edu 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:37:43 -0800
> From: mika at async.caltech.edu 
> CC: m3devel at elegosoft.com 
> Subject: Re: [M3devel] "target specific pragmas"?
> 
> 
> This is also an excellent reason not to permit "interfaces" to C
> code inlined into MODULEs.
> 
> Interfaces are the contract that the implementation has to live up
> to. Ok, so it happens that under operating system X on architecture
> Y, the easiest way to implement the interface is to call a C
function
> that "just happens" to have the correct interface. But on another
> system, which either isn't built in C or where the function doesn't
> exist, it might be convenient to implement the interface in (gasp!)
> Modula-3!
> 
> (I use this pattern as follows: on systems where Intel's Fortran
> compiler is available, compile from assembly (which was generated
> by ifort). On other systems, the code is implemented in Modula-3.)
> 
> Mika
> 
> Tony Hosking writes:
> >My principle concern is that once we provide C APIs then C will 
> >permeate the M3 space more pervasively (both apps and libraries). 
> >What happens when I want to bring up a system where there is no 
> >C?!?! Consider the SPIN OS perhaps...
> >
> >Maybe I am just being overly fusty...
> >
> >On Feb 12, 2008, at 4:35 PM, DragiÅ*a DuriÄ* wrote:
> >
> >> What we _maybe_ can do... is to make some special, preprocessable

> >> source
> >> form, which some quake command can parse into multiple files in
their
> >> folders. And these file can be compiled later...Kind of how
generic
> >> works.
> >>
> >> But, as current system works, and it does it very well, and as
only 
> >> case
> >> where we really need this is Windows... most Unices being or
becoming
> >> POSIX... I don't see it's smart to spend resources on becoming
more 
> >> C...
> >> Esp when "founding fathers" made it so good and so much non-C :).
> >>
> >> If we really need to make some approach to "their world", it's
much
> >> better to work on interoperability issues and thus cement our
> >> first-class-citizen language status even more.
> >>
> >> dd
> >>
> >> On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 15:16 -0500, Randy Coleburn wrote:
> >>> Jay:
> >>>
> >>> My understanding of Modula-3 is that rather than cluttering up
the
> >>> source code with a bunch of preprocessor directives to deal with
the
> >>> various changes needed by various platforms, a separate source 
> >>> file is
> >>> used for platforms whose implementation must diverge. The
m3makefile
> >>> is used to control the selection of these platform sources at
build
> >>> time. I like this approach much better.
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>> Randy
> >>>
> >>>>>> Jay <jayk123 at hotmail.com> 2/11/2008 8:21 PM >>>
> >>> So I have NOT thought this through.
> >>>
> >>> I wonder if "preprocessing" dependent only on "target" is a good

> >>> idea.
> >>>
> >>> Something like either the ability to prefix pragmas with a
target, or
> >>> an "iftarget" and "ifnottarget" pragma.
> >>>
> >>> Something like so:
> >>>
> >>> <* IF_TARGET NT386 *>
> >>> <* END_IF_TARGET*>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> <* IF_TARGET NT386 *>
> >>> <* END_IF_TARGET*>
> >>> It's a small can of worms.
> >>> Where can they be placed? Only at "global" scope? (ie: toplevel
in an
> >>> interface/module).
> >>>
> >>> What about IF_OSTYPE?
> >>> What about expressions?
> >>> IF_TARGET NT386 OR NTAMD64
> >>>
> >>> IF_TARGET STARTS(NT)
> >>>
> >>> etc.
> >>>
> >>> I don't really have enough interest here to work through this,
just
> >>> sending out the bait...
> >>>
> >>> Obviously this was triggered by my happening into the odbc
directory
> >>> and bringing up ignoring WINAPI on non-NT386 or prefixing
calling
> >>> conventions with a target.
> >>>
> >>> This reminds me of an important point here however -- nobody else
is
> >>> going to make the mistake of ever having multiple calling 
> >>> conventions.
> >>> Therefore the generality of prefixing WINAPI with NT386: is
useless.
> >>> Unless Mac68K support is added.
> >>>
> >>> And here is some rationale even. The PC and Mac evolved from
"small"
> >>> systems, where assembly programming was common, more people knew
more
> >>> lower level details and playing games with calling conventions
was
> >>> something anyone could do. Most other current systems are rooted
in C
> >>> programming. Working in C, calling conventions are generally in
a
> >>> hidden layer below what anyone thinks about. Therefore, the
smaller
> >>> number of capable people working at that level have the good
sense to
> >>> only have one calling convention. No more systems will evolve
from
> >>> "small", at least not without having observed this history. 
> >>> Therefore,
> >>> there will no longer be multiple calling conventions.
> >>>
> >>> That is my theory at least.
> >>>
> >>> Oh, Windows does also have __thiscall and __clrcall. __thiscall
is
> >>> only x86
> >> -- 
> >> DragiÅ*a DuriÄ* <dragisha at m3w.org>

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