Code Generators (Re: Temporary variables)

Carl Gundel morphic at hotmail.com
Sun Jun 20 23:06:25 UTC 1999


Whether or not code generators are evil is of course a matter of opinion.  
Unless I'm wrong, the code generator Chris is talking about (WindowBuilder) 
is a mandated tool.  Hand coding windows is unacceptable for many 
applications, especially when 2 or more people work on the same codebase.  
Like it or not, most commercial Smalltalk GUI builders generate code.

-Carl

>From: Marcel Weiher <marcel at system.de>
>Code generators are evil, and should be unnecessary.  If the
>necessity for code generation arises, it is an indication that either
>the developer hasn't abstracted the problem enough, or that the
>language is not sufficient for expressing the abstraction.
>
>Marcel
>
> > From: "Norton, Chris" <chrisn at Kronos.com>
>[...]
> > I really have nothing new to add to the discussion, as I agree
>with most of
> > the people who described various ways to do away with extraneous
>temporary
> > variables, but I wanted to point out that in my experience, the
>only methods
> > I've run across that had a size problem of any kind were the
>"createViews"
> > methods that are generated by WindowBuilder Pro (I use
>WindowBuilder Pro
> > with VSE).  In my experience, code generators will make some generic
> > assumptions and they rarely produce code that is as tidy as I like
>it.  ;-)
> > In those special cases, I routinely break up the generated methods into
> > smaller ones.
>[...]
>


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