Linkage Declaration (was Re: Standardization (of FORTRAN, Ada, ect.))

[Bob Dietrich]

In article <2086 at garth.UUCP> phipps at garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps) writes:
>Wulf attested to the high value of the scheme,
>but regretted the lack of a more complete solution.
>He concluded that he assumed that "the solution lies in getting
>an adequate characterization of ... the (rather vague) notion
>of `environment' explicitly into the language, together with
>primitive operators for its manipulation".
>
>Now if only the standards committees for languages like FORTRAN,
>Pascal, C, &c. would translate something like this into
>idioms that fit those languages.  I can dream, can't I ?

A couple of things I might point out. The first is that language standard
committees have their own "turf"; their charter usually precludes them from
addressing areas other than the language at  hand. This has it's good and bad
points. I don't want a language committee dictating what characteristics the
linker (if there is one) and the rest of the environment must take on,
although it might define certain minimal requirements. If you've ever
considered implementing something like fork() on a non-operating system like
DOS, you wouldn't like to be forced in that direction by a language standard
either.

The second point is that there is at least one international committee (one
of the ISO Working Groups in the range WG10..WG12) that is working on these
isssues. I'm too lazy to look up which one it is. There may also be an
American committee, but I'm not sure.

> 
>The widespread postings to language news-groups were to get everyone's
>attention; follow-ups might best be limited to "comp.lang.misc".
They have been.

> 
>Clay Phipps                       {ingr,pyramid,sri-unix!hplabs}!garth!phipps

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