Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
Joel wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
So what I was trying to say was, the point at which I will veer away from pp-based programming to other tools happens earlier than others'.
Interesting. At which "point" might that be? For example, which of the PP based libraries in boost would you consider using external tools?
My point would be before the PP library itself. I do, however, understand the attraction of having the compile process take care of it all. But "however however", building boost doesn't have to obey that scarcity. So I think it's entirely reasonable that building boost might generate C++ using *other* tools. I bet such an approach would lead to more maintainable and easy-to-understand code (only requiring knowledge of general tools that should be in a boost developer's toolchest anyway) instead of using the PP programming paradigm, of which learning I believe is less rewarding.
I think you are assuming that there's always something to "build". Yeah, I agree that would be ok (***). OTOH, lots of parts of the boost libraries do not require building at all since they are "all header". (***) aside: such an approach would lead to more maintainable and easy-to-understand code IFF we agree on a specific code generation tool. Otherwise, we'll end up with lots of tiny languages which will ultimately defeat the maintainability and understandability goal. Cheers, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boost-consulting.com http://spirit.sf.net