Re: [boost] PREPROCESSOR data structures

From: Jaakko Jarvi (jajarvi_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-12-17 17:10:27

> This is totally cool. However, I have a philosophical problem with the
> preprocessor library (maybe philosophical is the wrong word): If I have to
> debug code generated by the preprocessor library, or even understand the
> source, I'm going to have a hard time. 

This is a real problem. As a kind of an experiment, I used PREPROCESSOR in 
lambda for one file which has two dimensional repetition:

some_template_1, some_template_2, etc.

within these templates the repetition is within the argument lists. 

The code is much shorter than typing out all the 
different versions. And a sincle preprocessor constant can be used to 
change how many templates to generate.

And the library is awesome!

But still. The resulting code is _really_ hard to understand. And if you 
get a compile time error, I guess most compilers just point you to the macro 
invocation, which doesn't help a lot if the macro hides 500 lines of 
code. So I didn't went a head and use preprocessor throughout the whole 
library, but rather I'm thinkin to move back to the repetitive code in 
the test case as well.

Jaakko