On Thursday 03 August 2006 11:18, Chip Salzenberg wrote: > The whole question of packfiles is something I hadn't approached before, > and now that I have, I wonder: Why does a packfile needs to exist at all > when compiling into the in-memory interpreter? There are some answers to > that question I'd accept, but it's still a question that needs answering.
The trivial answer is that there are a lot of functions where Parrot assumes it has compiled code available. All of them could check for a packfile and raise an exception if not, but making it impossible to create an interpreter *without* at least some data there (even if it's an empty packfile) could cut down on that reptition. > PS: Cage cleaners should detect and possibly correct all that namespace > pollution. Yuck. In the external API, you mean? Isn't there a bug for creating macros to avoid prefixing Parrot_ to all internal-only functions? -- c
