Re: Preprocessor keyword #echo is missing

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

Martin Sebor <sebor@roguewave.com> writes:

| Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| > Martin Sebor <sebor@roguewave.com> writes:
| >
| ...
| > Hi Martin,
| >  As you know, I (and Joddy and Robert) reported on that paper at the
| > last Santa Cruz meeting.  The declaration form proposed in the paper
| > doesn't integrate into the language general rules.  Robert and I
| > agreed on pursing the idea from expression point of view.  But there
| > remains some corner cases to work out.  At any rate I would not
| > support a preprocessor extension to implement
| > that -- for reasons given the the refrenced paper.
| 
| Yes, I think recall your involvement with the proposal. That's
| why I would have expected you to be interested in a compile-time
| context-sensitive I/O facility like #echo (the name doesn't matter,
| it could be #pragma __echo). Are you saying you don't find the
| feature useful in general or just that it doesn't belong in the
| preprocessor (I certainly agree with that unless it's limited
| to what #error does).

Sorry for having been unclear: from a pragmatical point of view, I do
find the feature really useful in practice if not limited at the
preprocessor level.  I think it should belong to translation phase 7.
That is the practical point of view.

A note however: one would like to have various levels of compile-time
I/O facilities (informative note, warning, error, ...). I don't know
how to phrase that in standardese to make everybody happy (that is,
both casual user and the most skeptical implementor :-)

-- Gaby