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about C macro [message #1069203]

Mon, 15 July 2013 12:02

Yueming Hong

Messages: 87
Registered: April 2013

Member

HI,
My language needs to use the C type macro and inclusion.
And the macro is very complex, does anyone have idea to do this or have done it before?
Maybe it stupid to define macro in Xtext, is there any alternative?
Sharing your idea would be pretty much helpful to me.

Thanks

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Re: about C macro [message #1069229 is a reply to message #1069203]

Mon, 15 July 2013 13:10

Ed Willink

Messages: 7655
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi

[Yes it's stupid, but...]

The CPP is an overlay language. Implementing two woven languages is very
hard/impossible, particularly if you accurately respect the nested
lexical substition of CPP.

If you are determined to implement it yourself, you should implement the
two languages as two distinct layers. One CPP grammar for text to
preprocessed-text translation and another for preprocessed-text to model.

Many C/C++ tools have an ability to run just the preprocessor pass, so
you may be better off leveraging an existing implementation of at least
the CPP.

Regards

Ed Willink

On 15/07/2013 13:02, Yueming Hong wrote:
> HI,
> My language needs to use the C type macro and inclusion.
> And the macro is very complex, does anyone have idea to do this or
> have done it before?
> Maybe it stupid to define macro in Xtext, is there any alternative?
> Sharing your idea would be pretty much helpful to me.
>
> Thanks

Report message to a moderator

Re: about C macro [message #1069231 is a reply to message #1069203]

Mon, 15 July 2013 13:19

Henrik Lindberg

Messages: 2509
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

On 2013-15-07 14:02, Yueming Hong wrote:
> HI,
> My language needs to use the C type macro and inclusion.
> And the macro is very complex, does anyone have idea to do this or have
> done it before?
> Maybe it stupid to define macro in Xtext, is there any alternative?
> Sharing your idea would be pretty much helpful to me.
>
> Thanks

The only advice I can think of is "Run for the hills".

Have not heard of anyone that has implemented support for "C macros", or
"C includes" with Xtext. If possible to make it work at all in a way
that is not irritating to users it is going to be complex and expensive
to implement.

There are older posts in this forum on the topic with more description
of the issues involved.

I would instead try to change the actual language to directly support
something that is sane (i.e. not use C include/macros at all).

Regards
- henrik

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