[M3devel] M3 concerns

[Mika Nystrom]

"Randy Coleburn" writes:
>
>
>> Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 01:13:35 +0100
>> From: wagner at elegosoft.com 
>> To: hosking at cs.purdue.edu; m3devel at elegosoft.com 
>> CC: m3-support at elegosoft.com 
>> Subject: Re: [M3devel] M3 concerns
>> 
>> Quoting Tony Hosking <hosking at cs.purdue.edu>:
>> 
>> > My comments embedded:
>> >
>> > On Jan 4, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Olaf Wagner wrote:
>> 
>> >> Ah well, Windows is a somewhat special topic. I even haven't a
>system
>> >> here for tests, and most of the other contributors don't use it
>either.
>> >> I was of the opinion that Jay Krell had fixes or workarounds for
>most
>> >> current problems (except for the missing LONGINT support), but I
>haven't
>> >> tried his distribution archives yet. It would indeed be very
>helpful
>> >> if we could setup regression tests on Windows, too.
>> >
>> > LONGINT = INTEGER on Windows, which is fine as far as it goes
>> > (everything builds appropriately), but not particularly useful.
>> 
>> I know that it should run this way, but pickles for example wouldn't
>> be exchangeable then, would they? Has anybody tested pickle support
>> for LONGINT yet?

Well, I think this depends on exactly what you (not sure who said
this originally) mean by "LONGINT = INTEGER".  What you say is true
if indeed LONGINT and INTEGER are the same type.  If, however, they
are different types (as they should be), which just happen to be
of the same size (on Windows/i386), there should be no problem.
The Pickle library (at least ver. 2) transparently performs endianness
reordering and word-size adjustments.  (Pickles *should* be
exchangeable between 32- and 64-bit architectures, for example, and
between big-endian sparcs and little-endian i386s and alphas---this
latter property I use to exchange pickles between PPC_DARWIN and
FreeBSD4.)  Of course, have all the proper hooks been called to
enable this?  I don't know, I just know it's definitely possible
to set things up so that Pickles are exchangeable even under these
conditions.

     Mika