[Vm-dev] VM Maker: VMMaker.oscog-eem.281.mcz

[Eliot Miranda]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:19 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Apr 04, 2013 at 01:25:10PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 3:17 AM, Nicolas Cellier <
> > nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Yes, I always wanted to ask what oops signed-ness was good for?
> > > IMO, they could simply be declared usqInt.
> > >
> >
> > +10 raisedTo: SmallInteger maxVal.  But the milk is already spilt :)
> >
> > I'm glad you said that.  I'm reminded of House of Cards.  "You might
> think
> > so but I couldn't possibly comment." ;)
> >
> > It might be worth-while trying to make this change and fixing the very
> few
> > places where signedness is important (the SmalInteger arithmetic
> > primitives).
> >
>
> IMO an object pointer should be declared sqOop to clearly distinguish
> it from some something that is intended to be used as an integer.


OK, but is sqOop a void pointer or what?  void pointers are ok except that
they have to be cast all the time.  char * is poor; too easily confused
with other pointers.  sqObj * (where sqObj is some opaque struct) is good.
 Integral types are easy to deal with.  But signedness is the major thing
to avoid.  SO either unsigned or pointer.  But which?


> And
> a (32- or 64-bit) location in the object memory should have its own type
> declaration that would just coincidentally be the same size as a sqOop
> in the current implementations. And maybe there should be one more type
> definition to represent the 32-bit words in an indexable object.
>
> Dave
>
>


-- 
best,
Eliot
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