Re: mandatory newbie musings

[Norbert Nemec]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 03:13:57AM -0700, Quinn Dunkan wrote:
> These are stdlib questions, so if the stdlib is undergoing a redesign, perhaps
> they're out of date.  Still, I hope maybe my questions bear some relevance.
> Since there appears to be no stdlib documentation, I've just been reading the
> source.  I must say that it is very clear and well-commented (looks like it's
> supposed to be used with a semi-literate document-generation system).  I have
> respect for a language who I can learn by reading the source after skimming
> the tutorial once :)  The primary hairball is the whole type-safe overloaded
> methods thing, which I hopefully won't have to deal with since I don't plan on
> using many overloaded methods.

Actually, that's one of the qualities of Sather: co- and contravariance 
actually is a matter that affects any language that knows inheritance. 
Anyway: Sather is the only language where that is really thought 
through and well-defined.

Don't worry: after working with Sather for a while, you'll understand 
what it means without really thinking about it. (Maybe not in the terms 
of co- and contravariance, but you'll understand the concept behind it 
- it's just natural...)

> So here's the newbie musings:
> 
> Firstly, I had a bit of trouble compiling 'sacomp'.  First of all, the
> documentation is a bit inaccurate (it says the default make rule makes
> optionals, which it doesn't, and it seems to want to bootstrap even if you
> already have Boot/sacomp.code/), although it does warn about "outdated" :)

Sorry - still trying hard to get that straight... :-(

> The real problem is that the bootstrap compiler segfaults during the "Type
> check, generate, inline, optimize, and make C..." phase.  Editing
> Boot/sacomp.code/Makefile to use -O instead of -O2, but then it went ahead and
> compiled a broken Bin/sacomp with -O2, so I just copied over Boot/sacomp.
> sabrowse was segfaulting before, but now it's not, weird.  Could it be a gcc
> problem?  It's 2.95.1 under 'i586-pc-linux-gnu' which is the latest stable
> version from cygnus.  libgc.a is 4.14.  I read on the deja c.l.sather archives
> that this is a known problem with gcc, so I guess I should have looked at deja
> first :)

Correct: gcc optimization is buggy. I don't know where the bug is 
located and which versions show it. Just today, I worked ~2 two hours 
on a bug before I realized that it was caused by just the same thing 
again. -O is the best workaround known...

> The FILE class...
> I also have a disagreement with #FMT...
> Another question is exception usage....
> convention about 'self modifying' methods versus 'create new object' 
> methods?...

Guess it's covered by the new library. Look somewhere at

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/sather
    
for the 1.3-beta-2 version. Don't know whether it compiles, but at 
least you can look at the code. 1.3-beta-3 is just idling around on my 
machine here. I hope to get it to compile soon to get it uploaded.

It the issues are not covered there, go discuss it with Keith Hopper, 
the main author of the new library.


Ciao,
Nobbi




-- 
-- ______________________________________________________
-- JESUS CHRIST IS LORD!
--          To Him, even that machine here has to obey...
--
-- _________________________________Norbert "Nobbi" Nemec
-- Hindenburgstr. 44  ...  D-91054 Erlangen  ...  Germany
-- eMail: <address@hidden>   Tel: +49-(0)-9131-204180