Re: userland macros

On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 20:56, Cristiano Duarte wrote: > Is possible to implement userland macros in a PHP extension or it can > only be implemented in the core? A "userland" solution could be to use cc -E on your .php files. > I know that macros is a preprocessor task and I think PHP has no > preprocessor (does it?). It doesn't. > So it's possible to implement a preprocessor ? It's possible, of course, but PHP needs to compile fast as (without any accelerator products whatsoever) this is what happens on each request to a script. A preprocessor takes up more time and IMHO only makes sense in compiled languages (in the original sense of "compiled":)). > An example (or something like that): [...example...] thekid@friebes:~ > cat prep.phpc <? #define DEFAULT_VALUE(check_value, default_value) \ (isset(check_value) ? check_value : default_value) $a = DEFAULT_VALUE($my_array['some_index'], true); ?> thekid@friebes:~ > cc -P -C -E -x c prep.phpc <? $a = (isset( $my_array['some_index'] ) ? $my_array['some_index'] : true ) ; ?> Notes on command line arguments passed to cc: -E execute preprocessor only -P do not generate #<line> comments -x c Set language to "C". -C leave comments intact You might also want to do a grep -v '^$' to get rid of some of the whitespace leftovers by the preprocessor. - Timm