Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Programs that write programs. Following pointers from Ned Batchelder's recent excursion into code generation led me to another nice example of the power of dynamic languages. In order to streamline his use of C++, Ned wrote a little tool called cog which enables him to embed, in C++ programs, Python fragments that generate verbose and/or repetitive C++ constructs. He adds: For more about code generation in general, try: Dave Thomas interviewed about code generation. Dave Thomas is one of the Pragmatic Programmers, and I find I agree with him almost universally. He forbids putting the output of code generators under source control, I encourage it. We agree that the output should never be edited. The Code Generation page on the c2 wiki. As will happen with a wiki, this fractures off in many directions, with many different viewpoints, both for and against code generation. [Ned Batchelder] ... [Jon's Radio] 8:46:08 PM    comment []