Modula2's godawful IO.

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <11154 at mimsy.UUCP>, chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
> It is not difficult[*] to arrange for the linker to pull in a simple
> printf() if the rest of the program does not use floating point, and a
> full-blown floating point printf if it does.  [....]
>
> [*]What, never?  Well, hardly ever.  The trick is to have the linker
> examine the undefined externals for floating-point library references,
> and if present, link with `bigprintf.obj'; otherwise it should use
> `littleprintf.obj'.  It is just a Small Matter of Programming.

This brings up an interesting question.  The C compiler on the
Onyx Z8000 (R.I.P.) would generate a symbol "_fltused" if any
floating point of any kind was used in that particular module.
When the linker went to resolve everything, it loaded in the
floating-point emulator if this symbol was found and didn't if it
wasn't.  As far as I could tell, this symbol was nothing more
than a indicator to ld(1).  Does anybody else do this?  It seems
so much more reasonable than the ubiquitous "-f" flag.

-- 
Steve Friedl       V-Systems, Inc.      Resident access(2) basher
friedl at vsi.com   {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl