(j3.2006) Alternative binding label without C interoperability?

[Cohen Malcolm]

>I?m assuming there are analogous procedures for Windows and other 
> ?exotic? OS?s.

Yes for Windows (it has had DLLs for quite a long time).  More exotic OS's 
do not necessarily have anything.

>> If you're willing to limit yourself to dlsym and dlopen, and willing to
>> limit yourself to using interoperable procedures, it is easy enough to do
>> already.
>
>I would like to learn of it.

Just use BIND(C,NAME=...).  Then you know the name you need to pass to the 
dynamic loading routines.

>> Well, it would be easy enough to have a "BINDING_NAME()" intrinsic 
>> function,
>> specifically to enable dynamic loading (we could even require 
>> dlsym/dlload
>> to work if they are supported by the processor, by referencing the Posix
>> standard).  That would probably be ok for external procedures, but not 
>> for
>> module procedures.  For module procedures one could just have an external
>> procedure that called the module procedure.
>
>Yes - that would be acceptable.    But I am a bit surprised by the 
>restriction given that we can use BIND(C) for other module procedures.

The point is that BIND(C,NAME=anything but '') gives the module procedure a 
global identifier.  This really makes it like a "special" external procedure 
that despite being external can still access the module's private parts.

Without BIND(C), a module procedure does not have any global identifier, so 
there is not necessarily anything that BINDING_NAME() could return.  As 
mentioned before, this was actually the case on some older compilers (and 
could well be the case on some current ones, though I am not aware of any). 
Name mangling is just one way that compilers have of making it look as 
though module procedures do not have global identifiers.

Cheers,
-- 
........................Malcolm Cohen, Nihon NAG, Tokyo.