[Swift-devel] More OOPS feature requests

[Michael Wilde]

I'd like to raise 2 initial requests for language or runtime change as a 
result of the oops work.

- handling long in/out file lists via a file to wrapper when they get to 
long (already offered on the list by Ben, so this seems doable. Should I 
file an bugzilla req for this?)

- global variables: are these feasible and/or desirable in oops?

The motivation for this particular case was to fetch the @arg values (4 
to 6 now, but growing) all in the "main" proc, but have their values 
available to several levels of deeper proc calls, without passing all 
the values down all the way.

What the code does now is fetch the @args at multiple levels, which I 
thought was not elegant.  I suspect that is further use for globals in 
normal coding style.

So Im wondering what the view on this is, both from a language design 
view and from difficulty of implementing them. Has anyone else wished 
for globals?

Bugzilla req or more discussion?

The oops paper murmers about a 3rd feature, but I need to test that 
further, as the language may support it just fine. We have two variants 
of the oops , and provide an option to call one or the other, all within 
the same structure of nested rounds of simulation. One returns, eg, 5 
files for each simulation. The other only returns 2 of those five. We 
wanted to use the same structure to describe both outputs, and just let 
non-returned fields stay null. These fields are final outputs, so no 
swift code will inspect their value (at the moment, athough that will 
change). So I need to verify that we can return a struct where some 
fields are left null, without tripping into any undesired data-flow 
dependency semantics. I hope that this will work without problem.