Re: memory-as

[Hoehle, Joerg-C. <Joe...@t-...>]

Sam wrote:
>leaving the code cool-down issue alone,
It's now when I have a little time or the project shall wait another indefinite number of months before I check in the next thing.

>1. You did not mark WRITE-MEMORY-AS as ABI in constsym.d.
>   It appears to be a part of ABI just like MEMORY-AS is.
To tell the truth, I did not yet understand what .fas file ABI means.
Furthermore, when I built a mental definition of what it could mean (the names of forms that the compiler may put as calls in a .fas files and must therefore be present at load time), I found some names that did not match this definition (sorry, I since forgot which ones).


>3. Why did you use the internal SYS::DEF-SETF-ALIAS instead of the CL
>   DEFSETF?  SYS::DEF-SETF-ALIAS is internal to places.lisp.
>   foreign1.lisp should use DEFSETF like all the other places do.
Ordering of arguments.
I thought about putting the def-setf-alias in places.lisp but then decided to keep FFI stuff in foreign1.lisp.
(defsetf memory-as write-memory-as) expects the new-value last.
def-setf-alias expects new-value first. That's what I wanted because it is compatible with &optional &rest etc.

>4. Please add src/NEWS and doc/impext.xml entries for MEMORY-AS.
>   (an example would be handy too...)
Actually, I was yet unsure whether to
o document it as accepting internal-c-types only
o document it as accepting both internal and the symbolic primitive type names, thus making
  (memory-as p 'ffi:c-pointer) a valid call, instead of
  (memory-as p (parse-c-type 'ffi:c-pointer))
o document the 'string special case: it's part of a more general thing to dereference strings, supporting all encodings.
CLISP is still missing utilities to that effect such as foreign-string-length etc.
Maybe I'll remove the 'string case again, in favour of a more general utility, e.g.
convert-foreign-to-string -> (values string, bytes)

I'll document that item when I'll have made up my opinion about this.

>5. Please add some tests to tests/ffi.tst.
Oops, I forgot to check those in :-(

Thanks for detailed listing of things to add. src/CodingStyle could be a good place for this.

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.