Re: [ZooLib-dev] Re: [ZooLib-checkins] CVS: zoolib/src_other/tuplebase ZTS_BlockStore.cpp,1.4,NONE ZTS_BlockStore.h,1.3,NONE

[Andrew G. <ag...@em...>]

On Aug 26, 2004, at 01:50, Richard Clark wrote:
> I had to back away earlier due to workload issues. I'm making a new 
> attempt using the latest shipping xcode, though it's slow going. There 
> will need to be a couple of casts to hush the compiler (it doesn't 
> like "return nil" when the return type is ZRef<...>).

Here's the comment from zconfigl.h that explains nil's provenance:

/* We use the macro 'nil' extensively in ZooLib. It's something of a 
historical accident, basically
the result of an early collaborator Cyrus Ghalambor having previously 
worked in a pascal-centric
environment. NULL might more normally be expected, but its official C 
definition makes it problematic
as a subsitute for a null pointer. And there's a problem with having 
nil be simply zero, in that it
then cannot be distinguished from a zero integer. Herb Sutter's column 
in C/C++ User's Journal, May 2004
discusses 'nullptr', which will likely end up part of C++ in the next 
standardization cycle.
In the meantime I'm re-defining nil from being zero to something like 
nullptr. */

I've sucked all of ZooLib into XCode and compiled everything, although 
I haven't actually built a running app of any sort yet. Doing so threw 
up a few mistakes, and also a few situations where I had not corrected 
the use of nil. Some places we were passing nil when a zero integer was 
expected. In other cases we were returning nil when a 
default-constructed ZRef<XX> was required.

The code that's in cvs should already have all those fixes in place (I 
just now checked in a handful more).

A+
-- 
Andrew Green                           mailto:ag...@em...
Electric Magic Co.               vox: +1 (831) 621 1822