On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Well, compiler-independent is possible (e.g. hmake extracts
> dependencies from any Haskell sources, regardless of compiler.)
> However, language-independent is much more difficult. How could one
> tool deal with all of C, C++, Haskell, and LaTeX? Since each language
> has different lexical/parsing rules, not to mention different semantic
> notions of imports or inclusions, it seems to me that the only
> component of such a tool that would be common to all languages is the
> core dependency-graph analyser.
I wasn't thinking of something that would do all of the above at once but
rather a `library-like' base that people could slot into their own code
for determining from a given file what inferences & further checks should
be done from it. Presumably there'd be some common categories, eg,
* included file where changes don't force recompile
* included file where changes do force recompile
* file => dependency on (included file basename).(particular extension) if
it exists (eg .h generally implies depends on .o if it exists)
* check file at compile time for regexp (eg `Rerun to get references
correct')
etc,etc.
Being honest though I haven't given it any serious thought (and don't
propose to any time this side of submitting :-) )
___cheers,_dave______________________________________________________
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "`What sort of people would we be if
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm we didn't go into the Library?'
work tel: (0117) 954-5253 `Students.' -- Terry Pratchett
