Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!ucla-cs!heather
From: heather@burnett.SEAS.UCLA.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Recursive #includes
Keywords: recursive includes, modularity
Message-ID: <21037@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 27 Feb 89 16:46:42 GMT
References: <570@marob.MASA.COM>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: heather@burnett.SEAS.UCLA.EDU (Heather Burris)
Organization: UCLA School Of Engineering & Applied Science
Lines: 22

In article <570@marob.MASA.COM> samperi@marob.MASA.COM (Dominick Samperi) writes:
>Are recursive #includes hazardous to your software's health? 
>
> etc...
>
>definitions may be needed, what the heck). Furthermore, permitting
>recursive includes may tend to smear the separation between modular
>components of the software system, and designing a correct makefile
>will be a mess.
>
For those that have BSD 4.3 based C compilers, I would like to point out
that a recent addition to the C preprocessor enables the preprocessor
to generate a dependancy list that can be included in a Makefile.  Since
the C preprocessor had to parse #include directives anyway (and it does
this recursively), adding an option (-M) to simply parse #includes and 
spit them out wasn't difficult.

For those of you unlucky enough not to have this tool, here's something
to look forward to (and it's actually pretty easy to write something
that will do this for you in the meantime).

Heather Burris, UCLA