On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> On 4/26/2010 11:48 AM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
>> OK, so Pragma is bad; its historical from "primitive pragma".  But
>> Annotation doesn't capture the potentially executable flavour of
>> pragmas.  How about MethodMetaMessage?  (mmm, yum :) )  We could talk
>> about meta-messages for short. "Add a meta-message that does ..." etc...
>>
>
> But "primitive pragma" is every bit as wrong. A pragma is something that
> gives the compiler information about the code without being code itself.
> Primitives are't pragmas, primitives are *code* (if you don't believe me,
> just remove all of them and see how that goes).
>

I know, but within ParcPlace a <primitive: 123> mark was /called/ a
primitive pragma, and so "pragma" was the term we used (without sufficient
thought) when we did the menu and exception "pragma" work in vw3.0.


>
> By definition, a "pragma" is an interface between the code and the
> compiler, something where the code conveys meta-information to the compiler.
> For example, this is a pragma (assuming the compiler understands it):
>
> foo
>        <inline: true>
>
> bar
>        <tailcut: true>
>
> The first one might instruct the compiler to generate the code for this
> method inline, the second one to eliminate tail recursion.
>
> None of these, however, are pragmas:
>
> foo
>        "Not a pragma since it's not for the compiler"
>        <preference: 'Foo Preference'
>          ...
>        >
>
> apiGetWindowFocus
>        "Not a pragma since it's code"
>        <apicall: ulong 'GetWindowFocus' (void)>
>
> etc. I should also add that before the introduction of the so-called
> "pragmas" there was only *code* used in the <> syntax (primitives and FFI
> calls) and the change to allow non-code entities is something that, although
> useful, still worries me because of the conceptual issues associated with
> mixing code and non-code entities. We wouldn't even have that discussion if
> <> just meant "code".
>
> Cheers,
>  - Andreas
>
>
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