[CMake] retraining Autoconf users on the command line

[Brandon Van Every]

On 8/10/07, dave <dfeustel at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 04:11:38PM -0400, Brandon Van Every wrote:
> >
> > The biggest problems I've run into so far are all about translating
> > nested IF(cond) logic.  Especially since GMake can have "if"
> > statements in makefile targets and CMake cannot.  I've got solutions,
> > but the problem begs for real parsing rather than regex hackery.
> >
> There is a super alternative to re matching in Phil Budne's Snobol4, which just
> happens to be available as open source at http://www.snobol4.org. It builds in
> less than a minute on my 64-bit AMD 3500+ system running OpenBSD 4.1.
> The program also is extremely portable - even runs on Windows with a little
> help from cigwin or whatever it's called. CSnobol4 can be used as an alternative
> to sed and awk as well.

Lotsa language tools out there really.  Just a question of evaluating
and choosing one.  I'd look at Chicken Scheme first because it has
pattern matching of some kind in it, and the regularized parentheses
syntax is appropriate to parsing.  It's a Scheme-to-C compiler so
portability isn't a problem.  I wrote the CMake build for it, so it'll
run anywhere that CMake will.  It has an active development community,
so I'd be inclined to keep the momentum going with that.  But I'm not
married to Chicken Scheme for dealing with this problem if there's
something way better out there.  It just strikes me as a sensible
place to begin.

I spent 2 years jumping around between programming languages before I
settled on Chicken Scheme, and I have nothing to show for that except
broad exposure to a lot of languages.  So I'm disinclined to go on any
more hunting expeditions until I know I need to.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every