. Re: cross-stack globals, also, file inclusion

[Dar Scott]

On Saturday, October 25, 2003, at 08:58 AM, Rob Cozens wrote:

> In essence, what I want is the ability to declare symbol names & 
> values to the compiler.  If support for data structures and tool box 
> names were included in such symbol tables, we would be one step closer 
> to supporting direct access to system calls via Transcript.

Transcript already allows a rich representation of values and is 
suitable for representing values to be configured as structures or 
whatever for system calls.  (The allowing of nested arrays would 
improve this though; see bugzilla 555.)  These can be passed to and 
returned by external commands and functions in an external to handle 
system calls.  (There are some awkward limitations that can be 
circumvented by a sugar-coating library, but might best be addressed 
with enhancements; see bugzilla 676 & 678.)

So all that is needed for system calls is for you to get off the couch 
and write the external for your favorite platform or for me to make 
mine (currently low on my list for the general case) for platforms I 
need them in.

Maybe better representation of long multiline constants in scripts 
(maybe a sort of preprocessing mechanism might help) or some easy way 
to represent array values in scripts would help a little, but those are 
definitely not show stoppers.

Dar Scott