Re: Suggested improvement to gcc

[Nelson Minar]

>Currently, you have automagically available to any object the identifiers
>'self' and 'super' as possible targets for messages. I'd like to propose an
>additional one, namely 'caller', which would be the id of the object that
>invoked the method that's currently executing.

Wouldn't that be nice?! It's curious that no object oriented language
(that I can think of, at least) has this feature. The information is
right there on the stack, it shouldn't be that hard to extract it!

>a) does anyone feel this would be a useful addition?

It'd be terrific.

>b) how would the objC runtime system handle a sequence of calls back and
>forth between two agents? Any problems there?

It might be hard to write, depending on how hard it is to fish that
information out of the stack in gcc. The alternative would be to pass
it along magically with the other arguments to the method (including
the pointer "self" for the receiving object). But that would be a
majorly incompatible change to the binaries.

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