TDF Guide, Issue 4.0

January 1998

Footnote 1

There are facilities to allow extensions to the number of constructors, so it is not quite as simple as this

The "tld" UNITs gives usage information for namess to aid the linker, tld, to discover which namess have definitions and some usage information. The C producer also optionally constructs "diagnostics" UNITs (to give run-time diagnostic information).

Footnote 3

There is a similar distinction between tags introduced to be locals of a procedure using identify and variable (see section 5.3.1)

Footnote 4

Note that is not generally true for C bitfields; most C ABIs have (different) rules for putting in padding bits depending on the size of the bitfield and its relation with the natural alignments. This is a fruitful source of errors in data exchange between different C ABIs For more on similar limitations of bitfields in TDF (see Assigning and extracting bitfields).

Footnote 5

The vararg construction in C are implemented by giving more actuals than formals; the extra parameters are accessed by offset arithmetic with a pointer to a formal, using parameter_alignment to pad the offsets.

Footnote 6

If a formal parameter is to be used in this way, it should be marked as having out_par ACCESS in its corresponding TAGSHACC in callers_intro.

Footnote 7

However see also initial_value in section 3.2

Footnote 8

Exercise for the reader: what are the SORTs of these parameters?

The current C producer does this for some of the constructs, but not in any systematic manner; perhaps it will change.

Footnote 9

The order-specifying constructors are conditional, identify, repeat, labelled, sequence and variable

Footnote 10

A sufficient condition for not side-effecting in this sense is that there are no apply_procs or local_allocs in E; that any assignments in E are to variables defined in E; and that any branches in E are to labels defined in conditionals in E

Footnote 11

There are analogous rules for labelled and repeat with unused LABELs.

Footnote 12

This has to be modified if B contains any uses of local_free_all or last_local.

Footnote 13

However, we may find that the mapping of a constraint allows extra relationships for a class of architectures which do not hold in all generality; this may mean that some constructions are defined on this class while still being undefined in others (see section 13).

Footnote 14

I could equally have given simply shape_offset(sh_int) for S_i, but the above formulation is more uniform with respect to selection OFFSETs.

Footnote 15

For most architectures, these definition are dependent only on a few constants such as the maximum length of bitfield., expessed as tokens for the target. The precise specification of such target dependent tokens is of current interest outside the scope of this document.