[Texmacs-dev] Re: TeXmacs port to IRIX

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi Philipp,

> I've attached an initial diff-set (beware: these were by a script and thus
> include diffs of auto-generated files such as configure), hoping that you and
> the other developers will review those changes and include them, as you see
> fit. It includes the followings changes:

Thanks for this extensive work.
Would it be possible for you to cut this huge patch into
a few smaller ones: essentially one for each of the points below?
You may then post them at Savannah to the patch manager and
I will apply them one by one.

In the meantime, I took a rapid look at the changes.

>   1. Recognition of systems running Irix in the configure phase; this
>      includes the handling of specific flags to system utilities (chmod
>      doesn't have a -f option on Irix), compiler flags and permiting
>      non-GNU compilers. (I'll need to do some more work in this area to
>      check whether a 7.4.x or higher compiler is used, as older compilers
>      have issues with the c++ code).

I will look at this in more detail later.
David should also have a look at this.

>   2. Changes to fix duplicate argument names in function prototypes.

I could not find these, but I will correct that.

>   3. Removal of all uses of variable-length arrays from the C++ code.
>      While C99 permits VLAs, the ISO C++ standard doesn't allow them (the
>      currently discussed revision of the standard will support these, but
>      it's probably going to be about 2 more years until that). Our compilers
>      would allow VLAs for built-in types, but other may not. So I simply
>      rewrote all occurences of this for the sake of consistency, standards
>      conformance and portability.

It would be good to make this a configuration option,
so that we do use variable-length arrays on systems where
they are available (for speed reasons: by looking the changes,
I identified several parts where direct allocation on the heap
will really speed up the editor).

>   4. In a few cases I removed local variables that are set, but never used.
>      There's more of them (I need to review my compiler messages for these).

That is always good.

>   5. Reordering to code in the header files that use templates to avoid
>      problems with references to friend methods that aren't declared yet.

David should take a look at this.

>   6. A few (2 or 3) explicit casts to type (X**) for the result of a
>      "new (X*) [...]" operation to work around an apparent bug in our
>      7.4 compilers (I've also given notice about this to our C++ front-end
>      engineers).

No problem; we will correct that too.

> Furthermore, I have a question regarding a code snippet in the guile-glue,
> that I didn't want to spend too much time of, but which looks somewhat
> questionable to me. The file src/Guile/Glue/glue.cc has the following code in
> line 243:
> 
>     if ((N(s)>=2) && (s[0]=='\42') && (s[N(s)-1]='\42'))
>       return string_to_scm (s (1, N(s)-1));
> 
> I was wondering whether, the last assignment was intended as a comparison.

Certainly; thanks; I corrected this for the next version.

Best wishes, Joris