[Ecls-list] ECL as an embedded language on an Android game

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov at yandex.ru>wrote:

>
> I think (hope) there are not so many places in CL which allow to couple
> the code with the host compiler.
> Maybe this example with most-postivive-fixnum (-negative-long-float, etc)
> is the only one?
> If so, it must be very very rare case.
>

It is not so rare. Take for instance code that uses type comparisons. A
macro may evaluate its constant arguments to determine whether they are of
type fixnum and this result depends on the platform. I am pretty sure that
those checks are quite pervasive in the libraries out there. There is also
code that checks for the existence of certain specialized arrays (clx most
notably) and creates buffers and constants based on that decision. This
once more demands that target and host be tightly coupled: i.e. similar
endianness, word size, etc.

What I mean is that people write code based on the assumption that they
can, at runtime, learn things about the platform they will run on. If the
target and host are quite different, these compile-time assumptions will be
broken.

Of course those assumptions can be parameterized in the library, but this
cannot be automated by the platform that runs the compiler (ECL)

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
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