Re: 4.0 and include statements
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Jan 20, 2009
- 920 views
I still think that it would be a good idea to have some way
for a user to turn off the forward reference parsing for a
include file just like we can turn off type checking.
All the parsing is eating up start up time.
There should be no need to parse forward references in the
standard include files. I thought that was Jeremy's purpose
of having STANDARD include files that did not change.
I don't think this has ever been a goal of the standard library. And I don't follow your claim about the need (or lack thereof) for parsing forward references. There is more than the static code to consider. In the old way of doing things, it was possible for the order in which files were included to cause the code to break. Different parts of the standard library use each other, which would have caused some of this instability. But the forward referencing allows the code to be much simpler, and to avoid using routine ids, and other work arounds.
It's certainly technically possible to do this, but I'm not so sure that it's a good idea. You could have some really strange, and difficult to debug issuesone instance of which was the cause of the change in behavior.
Matt
