[comp.lang.eiffel] Genericity at the underlying system level

dowell@metaphor.Metaphor.COM (Craig Dowell) (10/25/90)

I'm very new to Eiffel and this newsgroup so forgive me if this is obvious
or previously discussed.

I've just gotten through Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction and it
makes a lot of sense.  One thing I haven't been able to grasp is how genericity
is implemented at the lowest level, though.  The following relates to p452 of
Extracts from the Eiffel Library:

Class ARRAY[T]'s Create procedure calls a C function, allocate.  The comments
say that allocate reserves an area of n integers.  How can this be generic?
To be generic wouldn't you reserve an n * (sizeof(T) equivalent) number of
bytes and have dynget and dynput index according to the sizeof(T) equivalent.
Is there some implementation dependent automagical intervention happening here
between Eiffel and C?

I guess my real question is where is the Eiffel/C interface defined?

-- Craig