Fwd: [Openmcl-devel] forward declare an ObjC message?

[Randall Beer]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Randall Beer <beer at eecs.cwru.edu>
> Date: February 10, 2005 7:37:58 PM EST
> To: Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com>
> Subject: Re: [Openmcl-devel] forward declare an ObjC message?
>
>>> The only way to forward reference messages would be to "explain" 
>>> their
>>> types to the bridge. It should be possible to write such a utility 
>>> that
>>> makes an entry in the type signature table fairly easily, but
>>> essentially it would be equivalent to giving a DEFINE-OBJC-MESSAGE
>>> definition with an empty body.
>>>
>>> Randy
>>
>> I wonder if it'd be possible/easy to do something like (not sure of 
>> the
>> syntax):
>>
>> (declare-objc-message ((:void show-me) a-window))
>>
>> which would basically have the effect of describing the message 
>> signature
>> without saying anything about the implementation ?  (That's sort of 
>> what
>> happens when libraries are imported now, and it happens as a 
>> side-effect
>> of DEFINE-OBJC-METHOD, as well.)
>>
>> (The idea is that this would provide a way to tell SEND what it needed
>> to know to compile calls efficiently, without forcing methods to be
>> implemented before calls to them can be compiled.)
>>
>> Without thinking about it too hard, I -think- that that'd be fairly
>> easy to do.  (Famous last words.)
>
> This is what I meant by "explaining" a method's arg  types to the 
> bridge. I don't think that should be hard at all. Basically, it should 
> just involve a version of UPDATE-TYPE-SIGNATURES-FOR-METHOD in 
> BRIDGE.LISP that doesn't require a method, but does require type info 
> so that the appropriate MSG-DESC can be built or updated.
>