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Re: Thanks for your reply Bruce

shawn@anarchy-arts.com (Shawn) wrote in
<7cnP4.88$g53.7468@news.uswest.net>: 

>>
>> - every machine in the world has a C compiler
>
>Then why not just use one of them ?

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying, 'Why not use one 
of those machines for Dylan programming' or 'Why not use C'?

>> > I would think C/C++ to Dylan would be more useful ? Can this
>> > take C and go the other way ?
>
>This is an important topic I think, Eiffel has a C/C++ legacy
>interface as well as Dolphin, why not Dylan ?  

I know how to integrate Eiffel and Dolphin Smalltalk with C, but how do 
you do it with C++? There are very few languages out there with C++ 
integration as far as I know. Do Eiffel and Dolphin Smalltalk really 
allow instantiation of C++ classes, inheriting from them, calling 
methods of them, etc?

>I can see the
>benefits above in being able to use existing C tools to aid in
>efficient programming from Dylan, but what about all the code
>written in C++ that could be used in the Dylan. I have about five
>different rendering libraries all optimized for speed that can not
>be used in Dylan because they are coded in C++. This is a waste to
>have to rewrite them in Dylan.

If your code is in C then it is unlikely that you will have much of a 
problem integrating it with Dylan. Whether or not you use a Dylan 
compiler that compiles to C. For example, Functional Developer does not 
compile to C. It is a native code compiler and it integrates with 
external libraries written in C without a problem. 

C++ is a problem because of the different name mangling schemes used by 
compilers, different binary layouts of C++ classes, etc. Any language 
that wants to integrate with C++ libraries will have to deal with this. 
I don't know of many that do.

>Dylan is extremely weak (unless I have missed something) when it
>comes to integrating with the most popular one of all C++.

Can you show me some languages that are strong in this area? How do 
they overcome the issues outlined above?

Chris.
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