entry at other than main (was want to know)
Raymond Dunn
ray at philmtl.philips.ca
Tue Aug 22 06:19:13 AEST 1989
In article <19164 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>In many articles many people write this, that, and the other argument
>for or against `main()' as the program entry point.
>
>Personally, I do not see this as much of an issue.
Neither do I, however:
>Anyway, this gives us some background with which to consider the
>options available. We have four standard approaches available:
> a) program begins at procedure or function declared with
> some special syntax;
> b) program begins at top;
> c) program begins at reserved name (`main');
> d) program begins at any function (Lisp, APL, etc).
A fifth approach in use that Chris seems to have missed:
e) program begins at the external symbol specified at link time.
Thus part of the "ideal" approach that Chris suggests is already prior art:
> We could allow programs to declare each entry point with a
>`program' or `entry' statement, and thus share subroutines and get the
>effect of switching on argv[0] on Unix machines, as ex/vi/view/edit/e
>and compress/uncompress do. To do this we must have the compiler and
>the linker cooperate...
There is no doubt that this is a cheap elegant "best" solution.
The fact that 'C' doesn't have it is only marginally a problem at worst.
--
Ray Dunn. | UUCP: ..!uunet!philmtl!ray
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