[m-rev.] for review: mercury.bat

[Fergus Henderson]

On 19-Apr-2001, Peter Ross <peter.ross at miscrit.be> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 02:11:02PM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> > Recently there has been some discussion about getting Mercury to work on
> > Windows without Cygwin.  The change enclosed below is not a complete solution.
> > But I'd appreciate comments about
> > - whether this is a worthwhile goal
> > - whether this approach is a reasonable approach to achieve that goal
> > - whether I should commit this part now,
> >   or whether we should wait until there is a solution
> >   to problem (1) [see below] before committing this
> > 
> > The main drawback, I think, is that solving (1) is likely to require
> > a fairly substantial amount of code duplication: scripts/ml is 1400
> > lines of Bourne shell script.
> 
> Maybe a better solution first would be to work on cutting down the size
> of ml.  WHen this is done, then I think the double maintainence problem
> would be substantially reduced.
> 
> I would be hesitant to commit this now, because even this solution
> requires cygwin to be installed so that calls to invoke_shell_command
> succeed inside the compiler.

I had a look at these.  In addition to the three problems I mentioned earlier,
there are three more related to the use of invoke_shell_command and/or
make_shell_command:
	(4) For mercury_update_interface.
	(5) For mkdir.
	(6) For fact tables.

However, there are work-arounds for most of these:
	(4) XXX There's no good work-around for this right now.
	(5) Don't use --use-subdirs or --split-c-files.
	(6) Don't use fact tables.

Even though there's no work-around for (4) right now, it would probably
not be too hard to fix.  I'll go ahead and commit this now, since Tyson
wants it, and we can fix (4) as a separate change.

> > +%MC% ... %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
> 
> Does this limit us to only passing 9 arguments to the compiler?

Yes.  I increased the limit to 30.  But there doesn't seem to be any
good solution to this problem with .bat files under Win95.

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