Re: [Caml-list] working %.pp.ml target with ocamfind/ocamlbuild

[Wojciech Meyer <wojciech.meyer@googlemail.com>]

Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> writes:

> This is useful for debugging purposes, and for some (minor) modes of
> use of Camlp4. However, for most Camlp4 development, this has the
> severe downside of losing the location information of the original
> file, if I understand correctly. This means that you don't want to use
> it as a transparent step towards compilation, but only in exceptional
> situations where the developers will re-edit the output code.

I think I've to say I disagree it's not useful, when I'm developing a
syntax extension on top of Camlp4 I really want to see the generated
code. Moreover to understand some of the more complicated syntax
extensions like type_conv, deriving, FoldGenerator I need to look at the
expanded code to understand how to use it - last time I hit the same
problem it was actually 'deriving-ocsigen' when I needed to implement my
own Show module - it's just much faster to see what's being generated
for the usual case, then trying to figure out from the recipe in the
documentation.  Otherwise for bootstrapping purposes, you might want to
pre-generate some code too and put into the repository.

--
Wojciech Meyer
http://danmey.org