Re: Using guile as an extension language for GNU make

[Hans Aberg]

On 19 Sep 2011, at 23:56, Paul Smith wrote:

> Rather, I need to define a translation from any Guile data type I want
> to support into a make-appropriate string (char* buffer) so it can be
> appended to make's read buffer, then parsed by make.  For any Guile data
> type I can't or don't want to translate, I'll either throw a make error
> or else just expand to the empty string.
> 
> So far, I have these translations (see the C code I posted earlier):
> 
> t             => "t" (for make conditionals, non-empty is true)
> nil           => ""  (for make conditionals, empty is false)
> "string"      => "string"
> 'symbol               => "symbol"
> 1234          => "1234"
> 
> I can see that it would be nice to be able to translate:
> 
> '(a b c)      => "a b c"
> 
> But what about more complex structures like lists of lists?  What about
> simple pairs; should '(a . b) => "a b" as well?  Lists of words are just
> about all make knows about so maybe the answer is yes.
> 
> And finally, currently I have all unknown types expanding to the empty
> string but now I'm thinking it would be better to start out more
> restrictive and throw errors.  This would ensure that people write their
> Guile scripts correctly (giving valid return values) from the start, and
> would let me, in the future, expand the supported types without breaking
> anything.

Perhaps you should have some Guile pretty-printing object that can be 
manipulated from the makefile.

Hans