Re: rewriting proxies' sending half

[Roger Gregory <roger>]

>From vlad!mark Mon Aug 13 19:40:49 1990

	The alternative of running "varargs" backwards to build a
	stack frame could be done, but would have to be rethought carefully
	with each port (either to a new architecture or compiler).

No, it would only have to be rethought for those ports where it failed to work!
We would have to build a small compatibility test, and run it as part of our
C configuration suite to figure out what parameters to set for Ccompatibility.
Not a big deal as most compilers would pass straightforwardly, the risc 
machines are the hard cases, this is one of the few cases where 86 machines 
don't seem to be a problem (I could be wrong here).

This is not meant as a criticism of the other approach, just a correction.

 
	I think this is quite straightforwardly doable.  I originally raised
	the same objection you are raising, and Roger had a good outline for
	how to do all this automatically (with a combination of "formic", a
	shell script, "sort", and "uniq".  I suspect Chris rediscovered much
	of it in order to measure the number of abstract signatures).  In
	fact, it is sufficiently straightforward (IMHO) that we could do it
	for first product if we had to.  Fortunately (by the above reasoning)
	we don't have to.

Aha, if you are doing this by hand it makes things a lot simpler, I hadn't 
considered the possibility of doing it by hand.  I also had planned on doing
the table as a real signature rather than an abstract signature.  This would
know the exact type of each thing we sent across the wire rather than knowledge
at the Heaper *, IntVar level.