Re: Conditional compilation of debug traces without cpp

[M E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org> writes:

> In GNAT, the use of preprocessed files is not so transparent, because
> gnatmake does not know how to run the preprocessor. 

This has already annoyed me a number of times. I'd have liked to use
gnatmake exclusively, but because of this I've been forced to wrap a
Unix Makefile around gnatmake which will first do all preprocessing
before invoking gnatmake. Ugly.


> In addition, you need different naming conventions for the original
> and preprocessed files. If the preprocessed files follow the GNAT
> convention (the simplest choice), then the editing environment (Emacs
> or GPS or AdaGIDE) will still not understand the naming convention for
> the original files.

A way around this is, to store the not preprocessed files in a
subdirectory and let them have the same suffices as the Ada sources.

For instance, the perprocessor input for foo.adb would live in
template/foo.adb. When using Unix make, a rule like

template/%.adb: %.adb
        ... preprocess ...

can take care of the preprocessing.

> With a proper makefile, you can run the GNAT preprocessor on _all_
> files.  If you use the GNAT default naming convention for the
> original files (so the editor works nicely), and tell GNAT to use an
> alternate naming convention for the preprocessed files (via project
> files), using the GNAT preprocessor will be as transparent as using
> the Gnu C preprocessor.

This is another interesting approach. Probably better than mine. Thanks.

Regards -- Markus