Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
On 8/1/06, Joel de Guzman <joel@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
Giovanni Piero Deretta wrote:
Anyway, as Eric said it may be better to make [include] more intelligent. What about making it take two arguments, one specifying the file name and the other the format? E.g.
[include somefile.xml xml] [include code.cpp c++] [include foo.qbk quickbook]
What about including only *part* of a file? i.e. marking a file with with comments with something like
--- in file source.cpp --- ... // quickbook:begin("section name") ... // quickbook:end("section name") ... --------
[include source.cpp C++ "section name"] would include only that part of the file.
Useful if you want to pull for example only a function prototype, or a single class declaration... Yes. These are what I had in mind when I asked Julio if he's interested to do more coding. Eric and Giovanni summed it all up. There was something like this before but it got out of sync with the code and got lost. I do not even recall now who wrote it.
As I'm working on this, I find some problems when trying to unify it all in a single "include" keyword. I.e., trying to support something like:
[include file.qbk quickbook some-section] [include file.xml xml some-section]
When including a quickbook file, the program redefines __FILENAME__ and also lets the caller define a file identifier for the included contents. I guess this is only applicable to this format.
Similarly including a XML file does not place a verbatim copy into the resulting file. Instead, quickbook generates a <xi:include> tag to refer to the external file. In this case, the "only include part of the file" suggestion is not applicable (unless we change the sematincs and just duplicate the included xml file into the resulting code; not too "problematic").
These inconsistencies could become special cases for the generic include tag, meaning that depending on the file format, it'd behave differently. I'm not so sure this is good.
Alternatively we'd simply have a new tag (dunno how to call it) targetted to other file formats. This could allow the features requested but not allow inclusion of quickbook and xml files. E.g.
[still_without_name_include file.cpp c++ main-function]
But then... there are three different tags to include files, each one with its own behavior and purpose.
Any suggestion on how to proceed?
Is dispatching against the file extension really such a bad idea? AFAICT, we only have 1) qbk 2) xml and 3) anything else regarded as code include. So why not simply generalize it to: [include file.qbk] [include file.xml] [include file.hpp optional_some_section] Am I missing some potential problems and gotchas? Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boost-consulting.com http://spirit.sf.net