To return anything that's not fixed-size from a primitive, the easiest way is to pre-allocate it in Smalltalk and pass a pointer to the empty space into the primitive. There are examples of this in the sound synthesis code and in the Siren primitives, you basically say:

"pre-allocate some space"
	str := String new: 64	

"Glue code adds 4 to pointer to skip object header; 
primitive returns the length of the string"
	length := myRcvr somePrim: str.

"Copy the real result."
	answer := str copyFrom: ! to: length


stp


Giovanni Giorgi wrote:
> 
> Excuse me,
>     I am working with named-primitive and I need to return a char* (= a
> String) to Smalltalk.
> The String is not of fixed or known size when calling the primitive.
> I have searched in the documentation but I cannot find how to solve this
> problem.
> I must return an array of integer and then conver it?
> What is the best way to do this?

-- 
stp

Stephen Travis Pope  --  http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp
stp at expertcity.com   --  stp9 at cornell.edu