Re: conditional compilation

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3985FB16.82D140BB@below.for.email.address>,
  Simon Brady <see@below.for.email.address> wrote:
> From my own (small-scale) experience I like what conditional
> compilation can achieve, especially the way it allows debug builds
> loaded up with paranoic self-test code.\x18I would certainly like to see
> a standardised, portable method of achieving such ends in Ada -
> however, the question of (a) whether conditional compilation is the
> way to do it and (b) whether support belongs in or out of the language
> seems to be very much open. I'd be curious to hear what people with of
> larger-scale experience think this.

I've often had to figure out someone else's large C program that was
chock full of target-dependent #ifdef's. Its a *nightmare*. Often times
you have to dig deep into the bowels of an even more complicated
makefile to even figure out which conditional branches your compilation
is using. I suspect the people who specified the orignial Ada
requirements had similar experiences, as support for C-like conditional
compilation was explicitly forbidden.

The Ada approach is supposed to be that you have different source files
for different targets, and use your build tools to choose between them.
From a maintanence standpoint I like that idea a whole lot better. But
it requires that the program be organized ahead of time for this
purpose. Developers aren't used to having to think about these issues
before they start coding. So most of the time the need for the new
target appears after the code is already complete. Then it annoys people
that they have to redesign all their code, rather than just graft on the
new target like they could with C.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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