At 10:30 PM 4/8/2002 -0700, Robert Spier wrote: >>Keep track of global (or interpreter local) scope with a macro >>upon entry. > >I shudder every time someone says "macro" on p6i. > >perl5 has several thousand macros defined. (grep for ^#define) (over 8000 >if you include all the embedding macros. it's down to ~4000 if you cut >out embedding, config.. and closer to ~1500/2000 if you rip out more things.)
Are you counting literals and things like bit values in your grep? >This makes it wonderfully challenging to debug. That might be a bit unfair, I'd argue that it makes it _easier_ to debug in many cases, particularly with constants. >Macros are a useful feature of the C language, but we should be very >careful in how we use them. (I'm not saying don't use them at all.) I'm >sure there's a happy medium somewhere between no macros and perl5. We >should look for it. 'macro' here is a choice of words... call it an inline function if you want. I'd be more worried about debugging that computed goto core than a macro. :) -Melvin
