Syntactical extensions vs. pragmas everywhere

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Aug 19 12:03:20 UTC 2006


>> I think that point 1) alone illustrates quite clearly why syntactical
>> extensions like the FFI should be treated as what they are:  
>> Syntactical
>> extensions. If text cannot be interpreted correctly by the compiler
>> (because for example there is support code missing which makes the  
>> text
>> intelligible) it should not be accepted. Everything else is a  
>> recipe for
>> confusion and disaster. This not only holds for the FFI but for *any*
>> kind of non-optional, code-generating (or -affecting) syntactical  
>> extension.

But why? seriously I do not understand why overloading  of <...> is a  
problems.
Why the compiler cannot query <primitive: > and do something specific  
with it
and query <ffi: module:> and do something else and not query  
<myOwnPragmas:...>

I would really like to know.

stef



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