#ifdef considered harmful

[Isaac Jones]

Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> writes:

> Graham Klyne <GK at ninebynine.org> writes:
>
>> Please, no #ifdef's in standard library code!

:)

> Much as we all hate cpp, I'm afraid the standard libraries are
> already heavily littered with #ifdefs.  Getting rid of them is
> basically impossible.

Perhaps we can work to slowly phase them out or confine them?

>> (d) For those differences that cannot be eliminated implementing (in 
>> Haskell) a portable preprocessor that can ship as part of every Haskell 
>> environment?
>
> I think this is ultimately going to be the most viable solution.
> Let's write a simple 'hspp' (in Haskell?) that is backward compatible
> with 'cpp -traditional' (although we might also design a newer nicer
> syntax too), and distribute it with every compiler.  It can't be
> too difficult, surely?  Half of the cpp parsing/selection code is
> already available within hmake.  I would take on the project myself,
> if I had time.

I agree that this should be possible with the hmake code.  FWIW, I
have, in fact, already teased that functionality out (to a small
degree) and made it available in my work-in-progress HMake API.  I
expect that there would be a function Distribution.Build.cpp and
needsCpp which are implemented in my HMake.hs code thusly:

> -- |Does the source code represented by this string require C
> -- pre-processing?
> needsCpp :: String -> Bool
> needsCpp = GetDep.needsCpp
> 
> -- |Return just the list of lines that the real cpp would decide to keep.
> cpp :: FilePath -> SymTab String -> KeepState -> [String] -> [String]
> cpp = Imports.cpp

Eww, that cpp maybe uses unsafePerformIO?  I can't remmeber.  Anyway,
if that's true, it's something we can fix.

Graham is, of course, right that populating the SymTab now becomes the
problem.  I did write a little function to make this easier:

> -- |Convert the environment to a SymTab.  Don't know if this is
> -- actually useful, but it may simplify interface to cpp.
> envToSymTab :: [(String, String)] -- ^Environment
>             -> SymTab String
> envToSymTab = foldr insertST emptyST

Anyway, take that for what it's worth.  The HMake code is nice &
clean, for the most part, and I'm working to refactor it to make its
various bits of functionality available outside the executable itself.

I plan to update this list on what I'm busy with on the LIP stuff Real
Soon Now :)



peace,

isaac