Re: A "Via Pascal" Modula 2 Compiler ?

On 2007-01-27, Marco van de Voort <marcov@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> How does the archive functionality of make exactly work ? Maybe it can
be
> adapted/configured for our system too.

The ar utility which allows to create and update archives under
UNIX is part of IEEE Std 1003.1 [1,2]. This standard also describes
the interactions of make with archives [3]. However, this standard
defines nowhere the internal format of archives as there exist multiple
incompatible implementations. I have written modules for Modula-2
and Oberon that allow to read from archives [4,5]. However, I have
always used the ar utility to update archives.

> Specially if you start to make more integrated IDEs (tautology, or
> degradation of the term IDE?), you want to be able to hide linking etc
from
> the user. Not only in operation, but also in error re****ting. Giving the
> toolchain more data significantly eases this.
>
> An archive format would be good for FPC too, since filesearching starts
to
> become limiting (a FPC distribution + Lazarus IDE counts thousands of
> compilation units). Having "release" units in a lib format could easily
> decrease this by a magnitude. Something for the next module rewrite.

In our new Oberon system, we are using an distributed object-oriented
database with transactions for this [6]. Here we say indeed goodbye
to make, as, ld and all other traditional tools but check in sources
into the database [7] and tell what we need [8]. We wanted to have
an infrastructure which allows to generate loadable modules during
runtime. The current state of this is available at [9].  But we are
still not using IDEs nor do we plan to.

Andreas.

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm
[2] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ar.html
[3] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/make.html
[4] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/modula/man/man3/Archive.html
[5] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/0.5/lib/man/UnixArchives.html
[6] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/0.5/tools/man/cdbd.html
[7] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/0.5/tools/man/obci.html
[8] http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/oberon/0.5/tools/man/obbuild.html
[9] ftp://ftp.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/pub/soft/oberon/ulm/i386/
    (currently for the GNU/Linux/i386 platform only; dynamic loading
    is not yet sup****ted but planned)