Boris,

I found that there are some things which make 1.23 MUCH less pleasant to develop such stuff on than v1.18.

You can always ignore the user primitive stuff entirely, and just carry your primitives forward from 1.18 to 1.23 if you prefer. The mechanism for "intrinsic" primitives numbered from 1 to 600 (or 700, I can't remember) has not changed since 1.18.

The UP support is unofficial, unsupported, and (originally) specific to Unix (and maybe some versions of Andreas's Win32 ports -- since I originally did it speficially to help Andreas make faster progress with his GL stuff), and nobody is suggesting that you use it if you don't like it.

1. User primitive fail code doesn't seem to work.

   myMethod <primitive: 1500> ^'hello there!'

If the primitive fails, I get the usual <error: primitiveFailed> instead of hello there.

A bug -- I'll look into it.

2. I can pass only 7 parameters to the primitive. This is

completely unacceptable for my tasks.

This is an arbitrary limit that is trivial to increase. Look at the Interpreter method #userPrimitiveResponse and it should be obvious how to increase the number of arguments that can be passed.

3. In 1.18, where I write my own primitive code, I can analyse

the arg count myself and thus develop a primitive to take variable number of parameters; can I do anything similar here?

Like I said, the original primitive stuff has not changed. You can still use precisely the same mechanism in 1.23.

For the UPs, the above could only be done by changing the way user primitives expect to receive their arguments. For example, if they were prepared to be passed an argument count and a pointer to the first argument, and then to pick up their arguments by indirecting through this pointer with an index, then yes -- it would be easy.

On the other hand, if the UPs want to receive arguments in a C-like fashion then it's much harder to do in a portable manner.

I'm not particularly attached to the UP facility, implementation, philosphy, or anything else. If it should be done differently, or even not at all, then change it.

P.S.: At the time you will be about to publish the next Unix release, could you send it to me just before announcing it so I can verify if it compiles/runs on OS/2, so you can announce it as a release "for Unix, including OS/2"?

No problem!

Regards,

Ian ------------------------------- projet SOR ------------------------------- Ian Piumarta, INRIA Rocquencourt, Internet: Ian.Piumarta@inria.fr BP105, 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, FRANCE Voice: +33 1 39 63 52 87 ----------------------- Systemes a Objets Repartis -----------------------