Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!peter From: peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Feeping Creaturism Message-ID: <700@nuchat.UUCP> Date: 28 Feb 88 12:25:58 GMT References: <8802181921.AA19069@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <682@sandino.quintus.UUCP> Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx Lines: 52 Summary: Have you ever heard of MAKE? In article <682@sandino.quintus.UUCP>, pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes: > In the following quote, you omitted an important part. I proposed an > IFF form for program source code that would allow an editor to mark > what had changed since the last time the program was compiled. No, no, no, a thousand times no. Look at the way the Mac is isolated in its own pretty little room by its programming model. A large part of this is due to the fact that source code on this baby includes a weird proprietary chunk of data called the resource fork. The last thing the Amiga needs is to duplicate more of the negative aspects of the Mac. > This > would allow for incremental compilers. I suppose a current-technology > compiler could make a copy of the source code it compiled most > recently, and diff it against the code it's being asked to compile to > determine what has changed. What's wrong with looking at the file dates and recompiling the modules that have changed since they were last compiled? If you're being well behaved then you have your source highly modularised in a bunch of little files. You only recompile the files that have changed. In fact the compiler only looks at the files that have changed. The program "make" does a pretty good job of this. The syntax is baroque, but you only have to climb that hill once. And for really large projects (megabytes of source) this is much better. > It might even be worth it. But I have yet > to see a compiler that does it. I have yet to see (or even hear of) an > incremental compiler that was not integrated with an editor. Do you > have any examples you can cite? (This is not a rhetorical question: > I'd be very interested to hear of one). See above. I hope most of us are already using it. Another thing to note, if you use an integratedcompilerandeditor you lose the ability to easily support packages containing code written in multiple languages. I could have a package that included a device driver in BCPL, C, or assembly, an IFF handler written in C, and a graphics editor written in Modula. I'd have to run the IFF handler and the editor in parallel and talk to them via messages, but that's totally cool on the Amiga. On the PC or under UNIX where the object module format is more standardised I could link them all together. And I can recompile the whole shebang, modified files only mind you, by typing "make". By the way, I'm the original guy who was griping... not just about AssemPro, but about Turbo-this and Deluxe-that in general. -- -- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva `-_-' -- normally ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter U -- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.