[Gambas-user] C like #include for Gambas

[jm]

Hi Bruce,

The broadest difference between #include (and its cousins #define,
#undefine, #ifdef, #ifndef and #endif) and OO programming is that
#include is a preprocessing command that gets to work long before a
program gets to run.

Using #include and its cousins, the idea is to build big readable
programs with the least amount of physical typing effort when used
responsibly.

I think if it gets pitched as a battle between OO and non-OO
programming, the debate is still probably winnable by providing lots of
examples where OO programming leads to more work. Basically if all the
#include functionality is performed in OO, you got to
keep track of objects, and as programs get more complex the syntax will
grow which is excessive physical typing and leads to this method of
writing programs:

object1.object_within_object.object_within_that_object.method(parameters1,..)

This can also turn into run time expense by having to dereference stuff.

[I guess that will in turn let the OO camp will post ample examples of
programming that leads to confusion where a use a of a #include 
is used irresponsibly and has altered programming behaviour in
unexpected ways.
This in turn will allow the #include camp to post more example where
OO behaviour leads to unexpected results confusing the programmer.

Lets not go there!!
]

Instead of that, it is simpler to put aside the OO v non-OO debate
and focus on merits of gambas having pre-processing functions
as a subject in its own right.

A #include that bolts together programs as needed.
When the run button is pressed on the IDE, the idea is that gambas will
do the pre-processing and stitch together the files to make a giant file
save it to disk as say file_name_to_run.expanded and then run that
expanded file.

When debugging, there will have to be some kind of option to switch
between expanded version of the file and non-expanded version of the
file.


Any chance of sneaking in this pre-processing 
productivity enhancing feature? :-)




On Sat, 2012-06-09 at 23:30 +0930, Bruce wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-06-09 at 13:51 +0100, jm wrote:
> > On Sat, 2012-06-09 at 02:45 +0300, Jussi Lahtinen wrote:
> > > Maybe I'm just too tired, but I don't understand the point.
> 
> Jussi, maybe I'm just too old as well as tired, but I can't grasp the
> point of taking an object oriented language and trying to jam an old
> (albeit well tested) non-OO concept into it.
> 
> Joe, I am having some degree of trouble really understanding your value
> proposition. Especially the last post (which I have snipped in entirety,
> sorry). All I can grasp from reading it several times is that you feel
> that #include has some productivity value in providing what we call
> inheritance and polymorphism.
> 
> I am not trying to put you down but I really can't grasp the ideas of
> "thousands" of parameters and "hundreds" of initialisations.  
> 
> { We, here at paddys-hill have tens of clients (well a few tens anyway )
> that use a dozen or so applications, the code base encompasses around
> two hundred or so classes and modules organized into around thirty
> components and libraries.  The total code size is less than 25,000 lines
> and I would guess that probably 60% or more of that is comments. At a
> guess, the "largest" method calls would be 7 parameters, and they are
> just convenience calls to a class constructor.  By far the "largest"
> chunk of code is a library that downloads the text of around 40 web
> pages a day (about 40,000 text lines), parses them, normalises them and
> uploads them to the central database. I just checked and it's 6345 lines
> of code, so about 2400 working lines, which are mainly involved in text
> parsing (things like discerning "Mac Donald" and "MacDonald" or "Miss
> Jane O'Donnel" and "Ms Jan ODonnell" are the same names). The primary
> application that uses this library runs once a day and adds about 1200
> rows to a central postgresql database and can update anywhere between 2
> and 10,000 other rows.  It takes "about" 10 minutes.  The central
> database has just over 3.2 million rows, the clients each have a
> sub-mirrored database of who-knows-what size.}
> 
> Anyway, I hope you can see from the above {} that those numbers you are
> using are fairly un-emotive to the reader.  
> 
> regards
> Bruce
> 
> 
> 
> 
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