Prototypes, was Why NULL is 0

Richard Harter g-rh at cca.CCA.COM
Sun Mar 20 04:38:15 AEST 1988


In article <788 at cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>The cleanest answer would seem to be to have a set of programming tools
>which let you construct a forest of entities (types, variables, functions)
>and generate vanilla C code on request.  (Sort of an |R**n for C.)
>(Preprocessors don't *have* to generate unreadable code; some of the
>clearest Fortran I've ever seen came out of a preprocessor.)

This is an important point.  One has to ask, which issues are to be solved
in the language design and which are to be handled in the tool set.  One
of the claims for Ada is that it is not only an language, but also an
environment.

If you have a bare bones environment, then you want a strong tool set,
and vice versa.  It is probably a mistake to think that all problems can
be handled in the language design.

There, now you have the general principle.  I've done the hard part.
The rest of you can work out the grubby details. :-)
-- 

In the fields of Hell where the grass grows high
Are the graves of dreams allowed to die.
	Richard Harter, SMDS  Inc.



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