🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Morgan Lloyd (mark_tbu@cix.compulink.co.uk) wrote:
>> In fact FTL seems to allow OPAQUE structured types

>This is the only compiler I've come across that does this, and it can be 
>a pain if one is not prepared. Specifically (and working from memory), it 
>rewrites the .sym file (derived from the .def) after compilation of the 
>.mod if it finds non-pointer opaques, which can cause intractable 
>dependency problems.

On the other hand, the "make" facility finds these dependencies,
which removes the pain.  There was, it is true, a bug in the
FTL "make" which sometimes forced you to do a re-make to get
it right; but this was just a bug - which could have been fixed
if the author hadn't decided that the market was too small to
justify further development - rather than a fundamental
limitation.

When I switched from FTL to TopSpeed, I found that I had to do
a great deal of code re-writing to adapt to the more
primitive (and now standard) rules about opaque types.
In my opinion this caused some elegant code to become
considerably less elegant, less readable, and more
error-prone, because of the heavier use of pointers.
I really miss the FTL-style opaque types.  In my opinion,
the present restrictions on opaque types are a major
shortcoming of Modula-2.

--
Peter Moylan                           peter@ee.newcastle.edu.au
                  http://www.eng.newcastle.edu.au/ee/Moylan.html
OS/2 freeware list at 
      http://www.eng.newcastle.edu.au/ee/Moylan/os2/os2info.html