On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 04:06:26 -0500, Ken Tilton wrote: > Ken Tilton wrote: >> Andrew Reilly wrote: >>> However, in this particular instance, I'm inclined to wonder why >>> meta-programming is the right answer, rather than just doing all of the >>> interpolation and what-not at run-time, based on a big table of your >>> algebra rules? >> >> I am afraid I do not see what alternative you are suggesting. I >> especially do not see how interpolation is in play. > > [Guessing pending your clarification] "Interpolation" does happen at > runtime. This not about the actually quite rare use of macrology to move > certain calculations to compile time, this is about getting dozens of > transformation-specifc rules written to fit into a larger mechanism (by > having the right arguments and returning the right kinds of results, > with a minimum of boilerplate and a maximum of resiliency in the face of > refactoring. > > The reason I post macro expansions along with examples of the macro > being applied is so that one can see what code would have to be written > if I did not have the defskill macro to "write" them for me. I sugest > one start there, by comparing before and after.
Please pardon my woeful grasp of lisp: that's probably why I'm off-beam here. It seemed to me that the bulk of your macro-ified/templated version was taking some text and a "reverse" operation and creating the methods of an object, or generic functions or ?? Each skill seems to have a title, a list of annotations, and a list of hints (and a reverse, which I don't understand). That all looks like data. Couldn't you do that with a table containing those fields, and key it off the defskill argument (or even the title?) at startup? Then you don't have to worry about re-factoring the code: there's only going to be one piece of code, driven by a table. I only mentioned interpolation because it seemed likely that you might want to be mutating these strings to be more specific to what your student was actually doing. I didn't expect that "42" was necessarily the right answer... To back out a bit, here, and get back to the meat of the matter: if one is using Python, then it's because one doesn't much care about performance, and it's reasonable to do expansions, pattern matching and domain specific language creation/use at run-time. After all, that's how the language itself works, mostly. When one finds that one *does* care about performance, that doesn't leave much wriggle room, though... -- Andrew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
