Re: Interfacing with C questions

[Marek Janukowicz]

Hello

I see there is a lot of misunderstanding, which no doubt can at least 
partially be attributed to my limited English and some poor wording. I'll try 
to be more elaborate this time.

By no means I appreciate C typing model. One of the languages I use is Ada, 
which stresses out the importance of using semantic meaning for variable type 
(as opposed to internal representation) to the point where enum values have no 
corresponding numbers (ok, in fact they do, but those are really hidden). One 
of the things I like about Sather is that it allows creation of quite 
extensive type hierarchies that do not get in the way (as it often happens 
with Ada), thus allowing modelling on quite abstract level (again - as opposed 
to representation level).

However, more often than not, I *have* to interface with C and deal with its 
weak typing approach. So if I ask about usage of C_SIZE_T type, it's not 
because I'd like to abuse it, but because a C function expects argument of 
size_t type and I'd like to satisfy it by providing properly typed argument 
from Sather side instead of blindly using INT and hoping for the best.

If I ask about EXT_OB usage in STR::create_from_c_string that's because I'm 
concerned with API that speaks about "C string" but takes "reference to memory 
location" as argument (especially that there is also create_from_memory_area 
which seems to be much better suited for converting memory references).

Your mail was very insightful (btw. what happened to Sather 1.3, as GNU 
version is 1.2.3), your programming language quite interesting (although the 
link you gave times out). However, it doesn't really answer my biggest 
question - how do I convert somewhat larger C data structure (the infamous 
char ***listptr) from C to Sather? Your answer "You can do this in the same 
sort of way that the Sather 1.3 stuff was done" doesn't tell me much as I 
don't know where and what to look for (if you mean that SOCKET class - there 
are only trivial C types returned from C calls there).

Yeah, I could rewrite the whole thing in pure Sather, but - given the number 
of libraries Sather lacks - I'd rather spend a fraction of that time on one of 
them and just wrap a C library that is known to work.

Also, it would be interesting to read some elaborate response on how there are 
no storage related entites in your Sky language. Does that mean you intend to 
implement everything from scratch and not interface with C at all? Or - if you 
want to interface with C after all - how do you deal with pointers?

Regards,
-- 
Marek Janukowicz