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Postings from August 2000
Tom Christiansen wrote: > > >Tom Christiansen wrote: > > >> C type declarations are pretty universally despised. > > >By whom? > > >This is news to me. I have always thought that the C type declaration > >is a concise and platform-independent way of declaring a packed > >structure, and effectively hiding implementation details (offsets into it) > >from the programmer. > > >What is wrong with them, that makes them despicable? > > Hiding the padding means that two compilers might not be able > to get at the same thing. So you don't have a problem with the idea as a whole, you just think the rough edges could use some polishing. I left portability issues out of my "adopt C struct syntax" suggestion, expecting a later conversation or ruling to resolve it: Either we inherit the quirks of the compiler we're built with or we define a perl-specific mapping, or both, through something invisible to the langauge user. The reference implementation, built in perl5, will be inheriting its :int type from the SVt_IV I think. > If you've ever tried to properly declare signal(3), you'll > see the main pain I was thinking about: > > void (*signal (int, void (*) (int))) (int); What would an improved way to declare a function that takes two arguments, one a pointer to a function that takes two arguments not described in this sentence and the other an integer?