On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 03:35:30PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote: > On 7/12/2013 3:12 PM, Timothee Cour wrote: > >I think the OP was refering to something different: ability to call > >an arbitrary executable / shell command during compile time of a D > >function, whereas optabgen is during compiling dmd itself: > > It's still the same idea - using external programs to generate source > code.
This idea isn't new. lex/yacc (or their modern incarnations flex/bison) come to mind. The usage is a bit clunky, but the essence is the same. > >what we want to have is this: > > I do understand that. I'm just saying that this can currently (but > awkwardly) be done in the makefile. At what point does the balance shift from having such an ability built-in, vs. just using OS-level facilities for combining different programs? For example, one could pipe source through a program that performs arbitrary transformations on it, then pipe the result through the compiler. Or one can write a program that generates arbitrary source code and pipe that into the compiler. Presently, such things are easily handled by a modern build system (of which makefiles are a rather clunky implementation thereof). T -- This is not a sentence.
