Function aliasing

Like calling functions in a different language, Cactus offers a mechanism for calling a function in a different thorn where you don 't need to know which thorn is actually providing the function, nor what language the function is provided in. The idea of function aliasing is similar to that of thorns; the routine that calls a function should not need to know anything about it, except that the function exists.

Function aliasing is quite restrictive, because of the problems involved in inter-language calling, as seen in the previous section. Function aliasing is also comparatively inefficient, and should not be used in a part of your code where efficiency is important.

Function aliasing is language-neutral, however, the syntax is strongly based on C. In the future, the function aliasing declarations may go into a new functions.ccl file, and will have a format more similar to that of variable group and parameter declarations.