[MLton] Semantics of giving a .c file to mlton?

[Matthew Fluet]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Matthew Fluet wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Ryan Newton wrote:
>>  This is perhaps an undocumented bit of functionality, but I frequently
>>  enjoy passing .c files to mlton directly, rather than compiling them
>>  to .o files first.
>
> Yes, that is supported.

Though, actually, I should note that the real reason for supporting 
passing .c files to mlton directly was to support debugging/resuming the 
codegens.  That is, one needs to pass appropriate -I flags to gcc to 
compile the .c and .S files produced by the C and native codegens.  Since 
mlton knows the right -I flags, it was useful to be able to invoke mlton 
on just a collection of .c files (such as might have been produced by a 
previous invocation of mlton -keep g -stop g) in order to get the right 
flags.

A useful side-effect is that mlton will accept any .c files on the command 
line, and compile and link them into the final executable.

>>  I was (probably erroneously) under the impression that I didn't need
>>  to do -export-header, and #include the resulting file if I was passing
>>  in .c files directly (mlton could do that for me).

I don't think it is appropriate for mlton to implicitly change the 
meaning of a c file given on the command line (say, by implicitly 
#include-ing another file).