Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Fix #1133

[Arthur Maciel]

Peter, thank you very much for always kindly answering my silly questions.

This info helps me a lot to understand more the chicken core. As time is limited, I have to finish an egg first, implement the new wiki style secondly and in third place start looking into core seriously.

But just to anticipate, is 'make check' enough to report any code break I generate  experimenting with the core?

Thanks for making this community warm!

Best wishes,
Arthur

Em 07/07/2014 04:37, "Peter Bex" <address@hidden> escreveu:

I also started a stub wiki page about chicken.h (https://wiki.call-cc.org/notes-on-chicken.h), but I agree that commenting its source code is a much better solution.

Best wishes,
Arthur

2014-07-06 17:02 GMT-03:00 Arthur Maciel <address@hidden>:

Now with correct subject. Sorry.

Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 23:31:18 +0200 (CEST)

From: Felix Winkelmann <address@hidden>

> More documentation for internals, even comments will do.

Well, that can be done. External documentation will quickly get out of
sync, but comments shouldn't be a problem. If there are particular
places where one could start, please tell.

Probably all my doubts are due to my ignorance about C and computer internals, but I would love to understand more the chicken.h file.
(http://code.call-cc.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=chicken-core.git;a=blob;f=chicken.h;h=f5a103ee14314f7c679e01dd8e11c0404043791a;hb=HEAD)

I feel really ashamed to ask this, but as I want to contribute more to Chicken, it would help me a lot to know about these details:
- Throughout the whole file I can't guess what is the meaning of some prefix or suffix letters in function names, like:
    - C_truep(x): I suppose the "p" stands for "predicate" as in Common Lisp, right?
    - C_c_pointer(x): what does the "_c_" stand for?
    - C_c_pointer_nn(x): what about "nn"?
    - C_fixnum_plus(n1, n2) vs. C_u_fixnum_plus(n1, n2): does the "_u_" on the second mean "unsigned"?
    - C_ub_i_flonum_plus(x, y): what about "ub"? unsigned byte?
    - C_a_i_flonum_plus(ptr, c, n1, n2) and C_a_i(a, n): what about "a" and "i"?

    - C_mpointer: the "m" stands for "memory"?
    - C_mk_bool: "mk" stand for "make"?
- Lines 777 to 838: I suppose the code is used for CPS, but I'm not sure about it and I can't figure out why it is implemented that way and how it is used in practice.

- Lines 876 to 909: although this excerpt starts with a comment about Clang and G++ limitations on statement expressions, all the hackery is only implemented when DEBUGBUILD is defined. I don't understand why. I also can't understand the code from 892 to 909, but I suppose I need more C knowledge to that.

I thought about comments like this in chicken.h:
/* "p" suffix (like in C_truep) stands for "predicate" as in Lisp tradition. See: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node69.html */     

The CPS and statement expressions could be elsewhere.

What do you think? Is it worthy?

Thanks for help and sorry about the ignorance.

Best wishes,
Arthur