Re: [rfc] split up symtab.h

[David Carlton <carlton at math dot stanford dot edu>]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002 17:10:04 -0400, Elena Zannoni <ezannoni@redhat.com> said:

> I see your point. But I have to agree with Kevin about the tangled
> web we could be weaving. Maybe we could start with a little
> cleanup. Are all the things exported by symtab.h actually used? And
> vice versa, are the files including symtab.h actually needing it? I
> found a few times that some dependencies were left in place after
> some code which needed them had been deleted, etc.

I'll look into that.  Actually, I already have one candidate for
cleanup: if you do "grep 'struct source' *.h *.c", it sure looks like
struct source and struct sourcevector aren't needed.  (And if you add
ChangeLog* to your list of files to grep, it looks even more
suspicious!)  So I think that's the obvious candidate for deletion
from symtab.h.  Also, I think that struct symbol_search could be moved
to symtab.c.  (Though I'd want to look into how that's being used,
because I could imagine that some such structure could be useful for
other files in the future.)  And I'll look into the reverse problem,
as you suggest, namely files that might be unnecessarily including
symtab.h.

Also, another thing that I thought of is that it's silly to propose
breaking it up all at once.  Right now, for example, I'm fiddling with
'struct block' in carlton_dictionary-branch to see how it would be a
good idea to modify it to handle namespace lookup correctly.  (And,
unfortunately, each time I think I understand C++ name lookup rules, I
get surprised by the compiler or the standard, and I realize that my
data structures aren't good enough; it's definitely a good thing that
I'm doing this on a branch...)  So maybe, as an experiment, I'll try
moving 'struct block' and 'struct blockvector' into a file "block.h",
and I'll try to be careful about getting the #includes and Makefile.in
just right; if it turns out to be useful, then I'll consider sending
an RFA to the list.  Getting just that one bit right would be a lot
easier than splitting symtab.h up into 10 files, or whatever I
proposed in my RFC: splitting it up all at once is just asking for
trouble.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu