Re: class browser compiled on FreeBSD!

[Jason R. McVetta]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 04:01:00PM -0500, Fuji Zhang wrote:
> hi, Mr. McVetta. thx for the instructions to compile sabrowse. it worked
> fine except i need to change tk80 and tcl80 the tk82 and tcl82 which are
> the versions on my machine. good job.

Thanks!


> i got a reply from another person about separate compilation. you might
> have got it, too. he seemed to suggest that separate compilation was
> delibrately taken out (or never existed) since that would force people to
> give source codes even for libraries. what i still don't know is that the
> language itself prevents from implementing a compiler with separate
> compilation or it simply was not implemented in the current compiler. i
> suspect Sather's strict static compile time type checking might make
> separate compilation impossible. i'm not a programming language expert.
> what do you think.

I got his message too.  It seems unlikely to me that the compiler
designers would /purposely/ remove separate compilation.  It sounded to
me like what he said about people being forced to distribute library
source was..  one good thing that coems from an overall bad thing.

I don't see why the compile time static type checking system should
prevent separate compilation, either.  A pre-compiled binary
representation of a class would only need provide the class's name and
it's type signatures; those things would alone satisfy type-checking.
(There is no need to re-check the internal workings of a class, since
presumably they have been tested and worked when it was compiled.)  Oh,
and it would probably also be necessary for the binary class to specify
the signatures it is expecting from the external classes it uses (so an
error can be thrown in case they are modified after the binary is
compiled.)

Cheers,

Jason

-- 
Jason R. McVetta                             Larkin.DynDNS.org/~jmcvetta
"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never
learned to walk."  -- Franklin D. Roosevelt