[m-dev.] export declarations

[Fergus Henderson]

Andrew Bromage, you wrote:
> G'day.
> 
> Peter Schachte wrote:
> 
> > There is no good reason I can think of for the Mercury language (as
> > distinguished from the current implementation) to imply that C's calling
> > conventions are the only ones.
> 
> Uhm... I may be missing something here, but isn't a pragma by definition
> not part of the language, as distinguished from an implementation "extra"?

Well, a pragma is just something pragmatic --- a compiler directive.
Pragmas are not part of the "core" language, but they may, depending
on which pragma it is, still be part of the language.
Pragmas are used for things that do not affect the semantics,
except possibly to make illegal certain code that would otherwise be OK.
They are also used for interfacing with other languages or tools.

> (Now that I think about it, if this is true, perhaps our implementation
> should warn about unknown pragmas rather than signal an error as we
> currently do.)

The default behaviour should stay as it currently is, but
yes, ideally there ought to be an option to only warn about unknown
pragmas.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.