On Nov 27, 9:56 pm, "Hendrik van Rooyen" <m...@microcorp.co.za> wrote: > "Steven D'Aprano" <ste...@rem.com.au> > > >GUI designer. You write a program to let the user create code by clicking > >buttons, dragging objects, drawing lines, etc. The GUI designer may use > >classes, but the purpose of those classes is to generate source code. > > Yikes, this is getting hairy- If "the problem" is to generate source code, > then you have to generate source code... > > >Testing code speed... you might have some functions with a loop, and you > >want to unroll the loop as an optimization. If you have one function, you > >can unroll it yourself. If you have a hundred such functions, you might > >want to write a program to do it. (Yes, I'm stretching...) > > Ok this one I'll buy - I can't think of a way to do this dynamically in a > class and get runnable code back. (but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.) > > > > >Don't like that Python doesn't optimize tail-recursion? Then write a > >source-code analyzer that detects tail-recursion and re-writes the > >function using a while loop. > > This is like TJR's example (I think) > > > > > > >>> Thinking further back, when I was young and programming in Apple's > >>> Hypercard 4GL, I used to frequently use Hypercard scripts to generate > >>> new Hypercard scripts. That was to work around the limitations of the > >>> scripting language. > > >> What sort of stuff did you do, and would having had simple OO available > >> have rendered it unnecessary? > > >It's been 20-odd years, and the examples were pretty trivial... I don't > >really recall exactly, but it would have been something like this: > > >* design a GUI involving lots of buttons on screen, each one with quite > >similar but not identical code; > > >* since Hypercard didn't have a layout manager, write a script to > >generate each button, place it where needed, and set the button's code. > > >Hypercard did have a message passing hierarchy (like inheritance for > >objects), so often you could take the button's code and place it in a > >higher level of the hierarchy (the card, the background, the stack), but > >there were odd cases where that wasn't enough. > > >Another example: Hypercard had a very limited number of GUI elements > >(text fields and buttons, basically) but I designed a slider control > >using a few buttons, each button with a custom script. To avoid needing > >to create and place the buttons by hand each time I wanted a slider, I > >had a script that did it for me. The script not only created the buttons, > >but it created the scripts used by the buttons. This wasn't as difficult > >as it sounds -- it was basically taking a template and doing some text > >replacements, then telling the button to use it as a script. > > Ok I think I am beginning to get the picture - when you have to do stuff > that the language does not directly support, then you use the simple > available elements, and create source code that strings them together > to make more complex stuff. -in this case its probably not trivial to > do it at run time. > > The "make the source code" then run it, introduces a kind of compiler > stage. > > For an old assembler programmer, this is starting to sound like macros. > > So a different meta law would read like: > > One uses Code Generation Techniques when the language does not > have macros. > > *ducks* > > - Hendrik- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text -
I have been converting stuff like sound 100, 1 exc... and just writing like 100, 1 for a number of languages and then just loading it into a spreadsheet so that I can save little pieces of songs exc.. I can even use different compilers or libraries that way.. I have started doing that for quickbasic, qbasic, free basic, qb64, c++.... All I do is use strings and '\n'.. I get to use a large number of older sounds and effects (for basic) on newer compilers that have aditional options.. It just looks like another music tracker.. I am not sure if that fits what you are trying to do though. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
