Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!mephisto!prism!tynor
From: tynor@prism.gatech.EDU (Steve Tynor)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: proposal for Ada preprocessor
Message-ID: <4376@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 14 Dec 89 15:11:17 GMT
References: <3285@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <7423@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Reply-To: tynor@prism.gatech.EDU (Steve Tynor)
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 24

In article <7423@hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu writes:
...
>   It seems offhand that the effect of testing whether symbols are
>   defined or undefined can be automatically accomplished by defining
>   an enumerated type containing all the symbol names, creating a boolean
>   array indexed by that enumerated type, and initializing it with the
>   appropriate values by named association.  Then the user would simply
>   edit the named associations to set desired options to True and others
>   to False.  Perhaps you had more in mind than just checking for "defined"?

What about the cases where disabling a feature should prevent 'with'ing a
package? (e.g. don't 'with' a DEBUG_TRACE package in a released version) -
Your method will prevent calls to the trace procedures, but the DEBUG_TRACE
package would still be linked in to the executable (ignoring potential linker
optimizations that might recognize that none of that package's code is actually
called).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.   
                     
    Steve Tynor
    Georgia Tech Research Institute
    Artificial Intelligence Branch
    tynor@prism.gatech.edu