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From: pepers@enme3.ucalgary.ca (Brad Pepers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: gadgets in 2.0
Keywords: gadgets 2.0
Message-ID: <1990May6.183020.17956@calgary.uucp>
Date: 6 May 90 18:30:20 GMT
Sender: news@calgary.uucp (Network News Manager)
Reply-To: pepers@enme3.UUCP (Brad Pepers)
Organization: U. of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Lines: 23


I read the other day about how there is a new gadget library that does all
sorts of wonderful things for you. This is of course GREAT.... BUT.....

The calling convention of the functions was something like:

     funcion(param1,param2,...,paramN,tag1,val1,tag2,val2,....);

Where param? are necessary params and the rest are tag/value combinations
with no particular type or number of them.

My problem is this: while this is ok for C (but you don't get type checking
and "safe" things like that) its not ok for most other languages. There is no
way to declare a routine like that for Pascal, Modula2, etc... They just
don't allow variable parameter lengths. So these wonderful new functions
can't be used by anything but C and assem!!!

Why couldn't the gadget routines take a pointer to a variable length 2D
array with tag,value pairs? This would be supportable in all languages.

Am I right about this or is there something I've missed??

    Brad Pepers