• yigal chripun <yigal100 gmail.com> Aug 04 2009

yigal chripun <yigal100 gmail.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:
 
 Yes, they have to be.  There are reasons besides overloading for including  
 other attributes in the naming.
 
 For example, if a function is pure, then becomes unpure, you don't  
 existing code that is expecting a pure function to link against it.
 
 In other words, the linker is dumb.  It only knows how to match symbols,  
 so you have to embed into the symbols the important pieces of the  
 interface that you want the linker to consider important.
 
 To answer Don's point, there is nothing saying that the compiler can't  
 read attributes and change its behavior.  Of course, those would have to  
 be builtin attributes.
 
 My opinion on removing existing keywords is -- don't.  There's little to  
 no gain.  Let that ship sail, and concentrate on future keyword proposals.
 
 -Steve


If we are willing to have our own specialized linker format than the compiler
can output data structures that contain a symbol with an assosiated map of
attributes (meta-data). This will remove the need to have mangled symbols. For
example, the compiler can provide to the linker the dependency graph as
attributes.