[Aimmath-developers] External calling and the Date package

[Neil S. <N.P...@sh...>]

I have just added and committed some new files:

OS0Win.mpl
OSWin.c
OSWin.dll
newDate.mpl

Currently, these are isolated: the main AIM code does not refer to them
at all.

The idea is to get the operating system to handle times and time zones,
which AIM currently tries to do for itself, not very successfully.  The
file OSWin.dll is obtained by compiling OSWin.c; the precise command used
(with the Visual Studio C++ compiler) is recorded as a comment in OSWin.c.

The file OS0Win.mpl calls define_external() to build a Maple reference to
the functions defined in OSWin.dll.

The file newDate.mpl, which is intended as a replacement for Date.mpl, uses
these references in the FillFromRaw and FillFromCooked methods of the Date
class.

If anyone is feeling keen, you could work on the following:
(1) Check that this works properly under Windows 98 etc.  My reading of
    the documentation suggests that it should.

(2) Work out how to do the analogous thing under Linux and OSX.

(3) Fit everything together: remove references to time zones in AutoConf.mpl
    and Config.mpl, make sure that define_external gets called in the right
    place (I don't think it works to just store the result of
define_external
    in lib/OSWin.m), and so on.

(4) Implement the rest of the functions in OS0DOS.mpl in the same way.  The
    time functions are documented at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sysinfo/bas
e/time.asp?frame=true
    and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/
_crt_asctime.2c_._wasctime.asp?frame=true
    I presume that the relevant filesystem functions are documented
somewhere
    close by.

Neil