Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <warren@ve3wwg.tk> wrote:
: you
: realize that line 905 of xyz.adb needs to be changed,
: where must the real editing be done? Probably not the
: file that the compiler used, because it was generated
: by some other tool. Often what happens is the xyz.adb
: gets edited, and the change is lost.

Hm, how can that be when you have deterministic rules
that will lead to one source text view given N configuration
inputs? Of course programmers will have to be aware that
they have to consider the configuration with care.

:> this looks like assembly language to me, with all its flexibility.
: 
: Yes, this is ugly, but not always _this_ ugly. Furthermore,
: if this ugliness were confined only to thin bindings, I
: could live with that. No Ada programmer wants to see this
: throughout his project.
: 
:> But why do we build higher level text structures and compilers?
: 
: I don't understand your point here.

Assembly language may be useful here and there but it seems like
programming is mostly done in higher level languages. If configuration
with conditionals in source files and assembly languge are considered
analogous, my expectation is that it makes sense to create a higher
level language for configuration. From another comment in this thread
I conclude that ClearCase has something like this.


-- Georg