On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Melvin Smith wrote:
> The situation we have now is: Parrot is a VM, and technically we could
> just punt the whole calling convention issue to a high level languages forum
> (parrot-languages if there was one) or something, but sadly that wouldn't
> work, because currently there aren't enough people to go around.
Right, and we're looking to be efficient for our core language set, so
it's in our interests to make sure that we're a good fit there. There,
unfortunately, is a land of variable-length argument lists and named
argument processing. Which we'll need to deal with shortly, but that's for
Part 2, and'll live on top of the base conventions. But to snip wildly:
> b) Parrot Standard specifies what conventions are _available_, but
> not which to use.
This is pretty much it. We mandate what the caller must provide, and under
what circumstances, to conform to conventions. (And we're getting
multi-layer conventions, in part because they'll make the low-level
library code faster) Beyond that it's all up in the air--nobody's going to
force any language compiler to use the provided information.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
