Re: RFA: shrink main_type

Joel Brobecker
2010-09-30T17:55:29Z

I'm sorry about the delay in getting to this. I hope it's something
temporary that we all seem to be busier than usual.

> One approach to restore that functionality would be to move the
> nottext flag into to the instance_flags of the type. Attached is an
> untested patch of what I have in mind. Comments are welcome.

It took me a while to figure out why this is necessary. Initially,
I thought that the vector type should have the NOTTEXT bit set,
but that wouldn't be sufficient for the case where we just print
one element of the vector (because we'd end up checking type of
the element and not find the NOTTEXT bit set, and thus print it
as a character rather than an integer.

Do I understand the situation correctly? If yes, can we add a test
that checks that, if not already there?

Based on that understanding, then I agree that the NOTTEXT flag
seems to be more of an instance flag than a type flag. The code
in make_vector_type seems to be confirming that.

If you make a proper submission for this patch, I will officially
review it.

--
Joel