OpenEuphoria

Re: load user defined module

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Nov 07, 2002
• 424 views

Derek Parnell writes:
> Rob, how would you recommend that coders deal with 
> this issue of platform-specific code, using the 
> current incarnation of Euphoria?

You can use platform() to determine which platform
you are running on. platform() is fast. It's as if you had
coded a constant, like 1, 2 or 3. No subroutine call is made.

Euphoria does not have conditional compilation built into it,
like C does. I'd like to keep it that way. Why add
a new concept to the language, for such a small advantage?

With conditional compilation, or a preprocessor of some kind,
you could eliminate code that's only used on another platform, 
thereby saving a few K bytes. 

However it's extremely rare, and getting rarer each year, for
a program to run out of memory because it contains
too much code. It's almost always an excess amount of data that
causes the problem. Over time, programs grow linearly (at most)
in size, while memory is still growing exponentially,
so I expect this to be even less of a problem in the future.

If you really want to save a few K by stripping out code,
you can develop your own simple preprocessor in 
an hour or so.

I know from coding in C, that it's more readable if all 
your nested conditional statements are at the same linguistic level, 
using if-else, rather than having two levels, with static ifdef's 
and dynamic if's mixed together. 

Something I could do is optimize statements like:
          if platform()=LINUX then
              code-block-1
          else
              code-block-2
          end if
so that no intermediate code is generated for code-block-2
when the platform is LINUX. I'd rather do that, than introduce
conditional compilation.

Also the code above, when translated with E to C, 
will produce C code like:

          if 3 = 3 then
               code-block-1
          else
               code-block-2
          end if

where I know that Watcom (at least) will eliminate 
code-block-2 at compile-time.

Keep in mind also, that the 2-pass binder and the translator
will eliminate all unused routines.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com