Transitional to Complete Void Safety

[Larry Rix]

Hi All,

I have an ECF with the following

<capability>

<concurrency use="thread"/>

<void_safety support="transitional" use="transitional"/>

</capability>

I need to take it to Complete VS, but the Project tool will not allow me to make the change. What do I need to do?

Thanks!

[Larry Rix]

FYI—I have tried directly editing the ECF text file and changing transitional to complete in either or both "support" and "use". No matter how I set these two, Eiffel Studio then comes up with an "error" condition when reading (parsing) the ECF while attempting to open it.

[Larry Rix]

An even BIGGER FYI!!!!

I decided to see if I could use the Project Settings tool to walk the Void-safe setting back down by changing it at load time and doing a clean compile.

I found that if I switched targets I was able to use the Project Settings tool to change the VS settings, and then selected clean compile. 

This resulted in the compiler issuing 5 errors (easily corrected). The real issue is: Those 5 errors were not showing up in Transitional, where I was coming from. They did not have anything to do with the Void-safe setting. They were improper creation calls (the code was presuming default_create and the compiler finally caught that there was no default_create, demanding me to choose a creation procedure from the defined choices in the create clause for the failing class creation calls).

So--I correct these errors and decide to up the ante from Conformance to Initialization.

Again--I back out, open ES, use the Project Settings tool to change the VS setting from Conformance to Intialization. I then close the tool, select Clean and Compile and what do I get? 57 (mostly Void-safe) errors that the compiler previously did NOT complain about when the project was previously in VS Initialization mode.

This is really REALLY disappointing. So, I am wondering why I was able to clear all of the compiler errors before--only to return later after clearing all errors in Transitional, going back to Initialization and suddenly I have errors where I had none before?

This tells me that something is perhaps not right in the EIFGENs or perhaps this is just the amazing PAIN of taking a non-void-safe system to void safety???

Oh well -- no more time for this today. Just thought you all would like some FAT to chew!!! :-)

Cheers,

Larry

[Larry Rix]

It may well be this is the source of the issue!

<capability>

<concurrency use="thread"/>

<void_safety support="transitional" use="transitional"/>

<void_safety support="transitional" use="initialization"/>

</capability>

This is from GitHub's view. The top line for Void-safety is what WAS and the line below it is WHAT IS.

Note that when I hacked this by hand, I set both support and use to either transitional or to initialization.

In the case of Eiffel Studio, it's made a different choice (as you can see above) using support = transitional and use = initialization.

Now--the real question is: How does this change how the compiler view the code and would having a "bad" setting here make the compiler "miss" certain errors that a "correct" (or "good" or "valid") setting picks up?

Inquiring minds want to know!

[Chris Tillman]

I ran into these types of strangeness when I was doing the same thing for a project a few years ago. I didn't document it, but just wanted to chime in to say you're not alone.

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Chris Tillman
Developer

[Larry Rix]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the feedback!

I have only ever started projects off at Void Safe being Complete or Transitional, with Provisional Syntax, and Full Class Checking = True. So, starting with an ECF and working it up to that place is turning out to be challenging! :-)

Cheers,

Larry

[Larry Rix]

it may well also be that I was unable to change the Void Safety setting because I was not load/opening the root library target of the ECF!

I was in a subordinate target I named "test", where the void safe settings are in the root (top-most) target. This all seems to have started when I actually made the changes to root target and loaded and clean compiled the root.

[Larry Rix]

The answer is to use the word "all" instead of "complete".