version and debug statements

[pagma]

In article <e4069c$2da5$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Ameer Armaly says...
>
>
>"Derek Parnell" <derek at psych.ward> wrote in message 
>news:op.s9d3gilp6b8z09 at ginger...
>> On Thu, 11 May 2006 19:32:07 +1000, Don Clugston <dac at nospam.com.au> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Since "static if" is now legal at module scope, it's now practically a 
>>> superset of "version". So it shouldn't be very complicated to move some 
>>> of the functionality across. (There's a problem with using 'static if' 
>>> instead of 'version' : if there's an 'import' statement bracketed by a 
>>> static if, potentially you have to compile the program to find out which 
>>> files are included. Obviously 'build' can't cope with that).
>>
>> And I don't want to make Build be a compiler too ;-) So I don't think it 
>> will ever try to execute static if statements.
>>
>Just a random thought, but what about moving at least some of the project 
>functionality of build directly in to the compiler; have it compile all 
>current directory imports and link them together.  If -c is supplied, then 
>the compiler would compile them only as opposed to linking, facilitating 
>flexible build processes.  An advantage of this sort of approach is that the 
>compiler already needs to know all about imports and locations, so the 
>logical extension of that idea would be to have the compiler act on them. 
>This is just something I came up with randomly while reading this thread; I 
>don't know whether or not it's been proposed before.

AFAIK its been proposed before.  I think the opinion of many was that the
benefit of having many utils that each do a particular job well, outweighs the
strengths of a single swiss-army-style application; hence the term "toolchain".
This also happens to be the main philosophy behind Unix in general, and (IMO) is
one of the main reasons why the parts that have always worked well continue to
do so. :)

Also, In the case of DMD and Build, each is maintained by a separate person - we
get far better man/hr per LOC coverage this way than if Walter has to manage
both feature sets. ;)

- EricAnderton at yahoo