[M3devel] M3CG

[Antony Hosking]

Jay,

I’ve been looking over some of your changes to M3CG interfaces.  You’ll notice that I removed your import of Cstdlib.int into M3CG_Ops.i3.  It does not belong there.  The type as declared:

 TypeUID = BITS 32 FOR [-16_7fffffff-1 .. 16_7fffffff];

is correct as is.  It is a 32 bit value that encodes a particular subrange, REGARDLESS of target machine.  It is improper to change that definition to rely on some C type.

I also have some other questions.  Why did you add the type Cardinal.T?  This seems entirely unnecessary, since targets don’t have a Cardinal type.  The only type they have is a target integer.  All other Modula-3 ordinal types should be simulated in the compiler using TInt.T.  I would advise that it be removed.  Also, I don’t understand why you changed descriptions of the primitive types to use this Cardinal.T instead of the original CARDINAL to hold information about the bit size, alignment, and byte size.  There is no situation in which a host will need to emulate the behavior of CARDINAL for these values (all can be represented using CARDINAL no matter what the host).

I am concerned that these changes reflect a desire on your part to change the world to fit your specific needs (whether justified or not).  The interfaces defined in M3CG were carefully designed and inherit from a long code-chain going back to the 1980’s and have not see huge changes since then.  I strongly advise against making changes unless you have good reason, because there are a number of tools that rely on M3CG (not just those in the public sources).

I am going to do a pass to revert some of your changes, since they are causing a number of my systems to fail to build.  (cf. Niagara on tinderbox).

I strongly advise that you try to use a private branch when developing new functionality.  We as a community can then go through a revision process to vet substantive changes before merging them into the trunk.

— Tony