Re: [UNSURE]Re: [ANN] lua-CodeGen 0.1.0

2010/9/4 David Manura <dm.lua@math2.org>

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 6:12 AM, François Perrad

<francois.perrad@gadz.org> wrote:

> 2010/9/2 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>

>> My first thought when reading 'CodeGen' is that it has to do with
>> _code generation_, not templating.
>
> templating is one way of code generating.
> But templating is often associated/dedicated to HTML generation which is not
> my only purpose.

My first thought also was this was related to the generation of
executable code [1] or maybe Lua byte codes like lcode.c, which is the
"Code generator for Lua". Rather, it's a templating system. A
"return Template {...}" would seem more clear to me--i.e. it's
returning a template object--than "return CodeGen {...}", which is
returning a "code gen", whatever that is. The module is probably not
setup as a Lua preprocessor in the manner of CPP. It probably is
lightweight enough to be used for code generation inside [2], though I
might opt for something even simpler [3]. It is a fairly simple module
to understand and use, and that's a significant quality (single 250
line file with no dependencies). Whether there's sufficient
flexibility in that simplicity for its use cases, I don't know without
using it.

I don't really like the syntax ${dependencies:_depend()} meaning "call
depend for each item of the array dependencies". That I interpreted
as the actual Lua code "dependencies:_depend()". It does have some
similarity to the pattern of a method call on an array being applied
to all members of the array [4]. However, as done it suggests that
_depend is a field of dependencies as in dependencies["_depend"],
which I don't think is the case.

I didn't see this collision with the plain Lua syntax.
This syntax could be replaced by ${dependencies*_depend()}
or ${dependencies[]_depend()}.

In practice, a template is a huge table constructor
in a specific file with very few Lua code, it looks like a DSL
with many string or long string.
See this example : http://github.com/fperrad/lua-Smc/blob/master/src/Smc/Python.lua
which is longer than the module CodeGen itself.

François

(BTW, this type of discussion might belong in the proposed "Lua
Modules Development List".)

[1] http://lua-users.org/wiki/CodeGeneration
[2] http://lua-users.org/wiki/ListComprehensions
[3] http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringInterpolation
[4] http://lua-users.org/wiki/SequenceAdapters