D/Objective-C 64bit

[Michel Fortin via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 2014-10-30 09:16:34 +0000, "Martin Nowak" <code at dawg.eu> said:

> On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:23:08 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> A DIP is available here [1] and the latest implementation is available 
>> here [2].
>> 
>> [1] http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP43
> 
> Instead of adding the selector syntaxsyntax you could reuse pragma mangle.

Nooo! Mangling is something different from the selector name. Mangling 
is the linker symbol for the function. The selector is the name used to 
find the function pointer for a given a dynamic object (with similar 
purpose to a vtable offset). The function has both a mangled name and a 
selector name, and they're always two different names.


> Alternatively a compiler recognized UDA would work too.
> 
>      @objcSel!("insertItemWithObjectValue", "atIndex")
>      void insertItem(ObjcObject object, NSInteger value);

Ah, that's better. Except you really should use a single string with 
colons, otherwise you'll have a problem distinguishing no-parameter 
selectors from single-parameter selectors.


> Changing the lexer and parser would affect all D language tools 
> (editors, formatters, linters, other compilers). So now that we do have 
> UDAs I don't see a justification for changing the syntax and grammar of 
> D.

Very true. I agree. Now that UDAs exist, it'd be preferable to use them.

That said, there are other parts of D/Objective-C that could pose 
difficulties to existing languages tools, some syntactic (__selector, 
or "this.class" to get the metaclass), some semantic (overridable 
static methods having a "this" pointing to the metaclass). I had to 
bend the rules in some places to make all that work. But it's true that 
nothing will be more confusing to those tools than the selector 
declaration currently following a function name.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca