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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
--Mark Hahn, <hahn@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu>
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copy and paste (Score:1)
Code generation is OK if it's transient -- passed straight to a compiler and run. If instead it's written to disk as a template, then it's just formalized copy-and-paste, with all of the maintenance downsides.
The biggest drawback to runtime code generation is obscurity. It's opaque to static analysis and smat editors, and to most humans too.
Re: (Score:1)
The biggest drawback to runtime code generation is obscurity. It's opaque to static analysis and smat editors, and to most humans too.
Indeed. A static analyzer would have to be really smart to figure out that I'm collecting together little pieces of code as I traverse the AST...
Oh, and there seems to be another cardinal law involved in code generation: whatever happens, don't ever expect both your programs to look nicely indented anymore.
Re: (Score:1)
In the worst case, you can use templates for the generated code. That pulls the odd indentation out of the main code.
Re:copy and paste (Score:1)
I might give it a try. It does solve the templating issue, but it introduces distance between the templates and the place(s) where they're used. It's a bit of a lesser-of-two evils situation.
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Re: (Score:1)
True. Java is actually lucky in this area: it's trivial to embed an arbitrary file in a Jar file right next to the .class that uses it.