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stupid macro question
While macros seem to be the topic of the week, I thought I'd try to get my
silly macro question answered by the experts.
So here goes:
I've been pondering how easy/fun it might be to port a unit testing
"template" generator we use at work from whatever it was written in
(probably C. It doesn't matter) to Dylan. It would be fun to write a Dylan
macro which would create an instance of some "testing class" which I would
define. Then it would be possible to define methods with the class as a
parameter to write out the template to a text file. The text file is
something we (the programmers/testers) write by hand now. It has a very
simple syntax, but a pretty ugly one at that. I thought a Dylan macro would
have a much cleaner look. So imagine some sort of macro where you'd write
something like this:
define test-Cpp-environment
test-function = [ myTestFunction ];
inputs = [ BlinkHdlr , type = cBlinkHdlr ,
test-values = cBlinkTemp, cBlinkTemp2;
test-var , type = myStruct,
test-values = { 12, 0, 0x1f } ];
outputs = [ similar to the above ];
test-code = [ compareBlinkHdlr_ptr = new cBlinkHdlr;
do_Test();
];
end test-Cpp-environment;
My question is: Can you insert totally non-Dylan stuff as text inside a
macro? In other words, the text within the brackets after the test-code =
... would be actual C++ code. I don't think that Dylan allows you to match
on totally non-Dylan text, but I thought I'd ask. If Dylan could match on
this, I would then like to put quotes around it (i.e., make it a string) and
store it into some slot in the hypothetical test class. With all the other
talk about the ?:* pattern, it seemed at least worth asking.
Otherwise, it looks like the only other way to do this would be to actually
write my own parser. The d2c parsergen looks totally undocumented.
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