Keyword "inert"

[Marvin Humphrey <ma...@rectangular.com>]

Keyword "inert"

Greets,

The keyword "inert" has been present in some of the Boilerplater code that's
gone by in recent commits.  It means "the opposite of dynamic".  

  * An "inert" class is not instantiable.
  * An "inert" subroutine is an independent function provided by a class,
    rather than an object method.
  * An "inert" variable is a shared global as opposed to a member variable.
  
In Java, "static" is the keyword that means "the opposite of dynamic", and
that is what I had originally used in Boilerplater.  However, "static" has a
different meaning in C, which yielded some confusing inconsistencies: 

  * "static" functions declared in a .bp file were in fact being
    declared as ordinary C functions -- which are implicitly "extern" when
    declared in a header as opposed to "static".
  * Similarly, "static" variables were actually being declared as "extern" in
    the autogenerated C header as well.
  * Implicitly "dynamic" Boilerplater methods have small autogenerated "static
    inline" invocation wrappers.

To resolve the conflict, "inert" has been substituted.  Here's a sample:

  /** Utilities for parsing, interpreting and generating index file names.
   */
  inert class Lucy::Util::IndexFileNames cnick IxFileNames {

    /** Skip past the first instance of an underscore in the CharBuf, then
     * attempt to decode a base 36 number.  For example, "snapshot_5.json"
     * yields 5, and "seg_a1" yields 27.
     *
     * @return a generation number, or 0 if no number can be extracted.
     */
    inert i32_t
    extract_gen(const CharBuf *name);

    /** qsort-friendly routine for comparing CharBufs according to
     * extract_gen(). 
     */
    inert int
    compare_gen(const void *va, const void *vb);

    /** Return the name of the latest generation snapshot file in the Folder,
     * or NULL if no such file exists.
     */
    inert incremented CharBuf*
    latest_snapshot(Folder *folder);
  }

Marvin Humphrey