"Iain K. Hanson" <iain.hanson@videonetworks.com> wrote
The preprocessor is NOT a code generator IMHO. It is a textual substitution processor. In some ways I regard external tools as more honest as they do not pretend to be C++ source code.
I don't know what you definition of "code generator" is, but I think, it's what allows to generate code based on some minimal input provided. So, if my user says: REGISTER(foo, (class)(bool)(TEMPLATE(2))); And this is expanded into two template specializations for class template foo, with a class, bool, and template<class, class> class template parameters, one of them capable of serializing an instantiation of such a template into a compile-time vector of integral constants, and another one capable of re-constructing such an instance from this vector, you would not qualify it as "code generation"?
IMHO external tools that do text substitution are equivilent to the Cpp and do count. If you are after Good ( TM ) code generation tools then I would go for graphical case tools that understand the language and type system.
Preprocessor has an obvious advantage of availability to everybody. I, for instance, am very reluctant in downloading/using tools. I suspect many people are like this, too.
DRY?
"Don't repeat yourself". Many tasks would require manual code duplication if not done with Boost PP (which does it for you) Regards, Arkadiy