🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4l0si4$pqd@gaia.ns.utk.edu> mbk@caffeine.engr.utk.edu (Matt Kennel) writes:

> : > >How would you have maintained C-style linkage and C++ typesafe
> : > >linkage in the same object module without changing the linker?
> 
> : > By writing a linker pre-pass program which checks for and enforces
> : > the type-safe linking rules.
> 
> : But such a program (a) would have to be rewritten for every machine
> : to which C++ was ported, and (b) would not solve the problem of what
> : name to give the linker for overloaded functions with the same name.
> 
> So?  
> 
> Eiffel and Ada and Sather compilers do it and their generics
> work like a swiss watch.

You mean you can link together object files produced by two different
Eiffel compilers and it's guaranteed that the link will work?  If so,
that guarantee is quite new: the last time I used an Eiffel compiler,
it didn't even have such a notion as compiling a single source file
into a single object file and then linking together the resulting
object files.  The only user-visible files were the source (.e) files
and the executable.  

I certainly doubt if there's any portable way to compile part of an
Eiffel program with one Eiffel compiler and part with a different one.
The issue of source-level portability between Eiffel implementations
is being resolved, but binary-level portability seems to be a very
long way in the future.

(In the case of Sather, of course, the issue of linking together
object files from two different compilers doesn't arise, since there
is only one Sather compiler.  Standardization is only an issue once
there's more than one implementation to standardize.)
-- 
Matt Austern
SGI: MTI Compilers Group
austern@isolde.mti.sgi.com