OpenEuphoria

Re: Including Files

• Posted by Chris Bensler <bensler at nt.net> Dec 01, 2006
• 801 views

cklester wrote:
> 
> > That is not a very easy thing to do. Doing so would require changing how Eu
> > processes code.
> 
> I don't see how
> 
>    include smith.e
> 
> is that much more complicated than
> 
>    include "smith.e"
> 
> or
> 
>    sequence smith
>    smith = "smith.e"
> 
>    include smith
> 

For one thing, it's abmiguous. Is smith a variable or a filename without an
extension? If it were up to me, I would resolve this by forcing all literal
filenames to be quoted. But that breaks compatability.

The other major issue is that Eu assumes all the files are technically included
before any code is executed. We can 'hack' around it using the interpetter
because of how it parses source code, but the same is not posible for a bound
application. A bound application has already parsed and included it's files
before it even begins to execute anything. So the dummy file would always be
empty, regardless of your attempts to rewrite it.
A bound application would have to be capable of parsing and translating to op
code during runtime, which would impose load time latencies during the run of
your program whenever a new file is encountered.
Any file that contains a dynamic include statement would also have to be
processed everytime it's included, regardless if it was already parsed, since you
couldn't guarantee that the dynamically included files within that include will
be the same.

If eu supported string execution it would be possible, but there is still the
include statement abiguity and the overhead imposed by runtime parsing.

Chris Bensler
~ The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra ~
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