Re: embedding C code in a shell script

[Dave Yost <Dave@Yost.com>]

Cool, thanks.

Dave

At 08:49 PM -0800 2009-01-11, Bart Schaefer wrote:
>On Jan 11,  2:12pm, Dave Yost wrote:
>}
>} It just occurred to me that with very little work, zsh could add this
>} feature using similar techniques to the what you can read about here:
>}    http://yost.com/computers/compileAndGo/index.html#Future
>
>[Aside:  To answer the question in your script at that web page, the
>reason you have to use backticks instead of $(...) is because of the
>unbalanced right-parens in the case ... esac syntax.  In recent shells
>you can add opening left parens in case statements and then it's OK to
>put $(...) around the whole thing.  Also, please forgive me for the
>following commentary, but if you're going to post a link to something
>you've got to expect some critique.]
>
>Years ago, like 1990+/-, I had a friend who used a csh alias "cx"
>which stood for "compile and execute" and which boiled down to:
>    alias cx "cc *.c && ./a.out"
>This still gives me the willies when I think about it, and it's giving
>me an unpleasant first reaction to this discussion.
>
>Suppressing that flashback for the moment, compileAndGo seems like an
>application begging for here-documents.  Why make the compileAndGo
>program do the work of parsing the variable declarations and so forth
>(especially since it does it with sed), when one could let the shell
>do the parsing, pass those values through the environment, and just
>compile standard input ala:
>
>  #!/bin/sh
>  compiled=realpath compiler=gcc compileAndGo <<\EOCAG
>  #include <stdio.h>
>  // ... etc ...
>  EOCAG
>
>??  This allows you to do things like compute the compiled name from
>the file name, e.g.
>
>  #!/bin/zsh -f
>  compiled=${0:t:r} compiler=gcc compileAndGo ...
>
>And as long as you're at it, you might as well provide the option
>to have compileAndGo create the main() routine for you so all you
>have to write is the code that forms the function body.
>
>} You could compile the code as a separate command, or you could do
>} more work and dynamically link it in and call it.
>
>The way to do that in zsh would be to have a template zsh module
>source file, insert the function name and body into it, compile it
>(which probably still requires a zsh source tree although I think
>Clint (?) spent some time working on being able to compile modules
>on their own), drop it in a directory in $module_path, and zmodload.
>The bootup function for the module could check whether it needs to
>be recompiled, I *think*, though it might be tricky to get it to
>re-zmodload something with which it just overwrote itself.
>
>Your next exercise is to write compileAndGo as a zsh module that can
>recompile itself as you update it. :-)