Re: LuaMacro

[Ivan Kolev <ikolev@...>]

Ivan Kolev wrote:
> 1. Static (compile-time) asserts
> 2. Functions which need to be evaluated at compile-time
> 3. Issuing diagnostic messages containing location (file/line number) info
> 4. Executing different code in different configurations of the code
> 5. Supporting different compilers
> 6. Defining constants to be used in Windows resource files (.rc)
> 7. Rare cases to avoid code duplication
> 8. Creating new syntax where the language doesn't have the needed 
> facilities

In my previous message I forgot to mention that case 4 will appear in any large-scale production code in any programming language, IMO. For example, I've done very little programming in Java (J2ME games), and even in that small project we found the C preprocessor to be the only solution to add/remove some code in Debug/Release builds. Maybe I haven't done enough production code in Lua yet to encounter the same case (but I know that others have, namely Ivan-Assen Ivanov who has complained here about the lack of Debug-build-only asserts in Lua).

> From the above list, it seems that compile-time code preprocessing can fall into 3 major cases:
- support for different code configurations (where runtime distinguishing between them is not appropriate, most likely for performance)
- compile-time optimization (or "reduction")
- compile-time code generation (or "expansion")

I begin to suspect that this list of compile-time (or actually pre-compile time) code transformation needs is valid for any large-scale production code in any programming language. But I don't have that much cross-language experience so I may be wrong.

Regards,
Ivan