Compile time executable calling?

[Tofu Ninja]

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 17:08:48 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 07/15/2013 08:05 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
>
> > We should be as flexible as possible and leave the decision
> up to the
> > programmer. We shouldn't restrict a feature based on a
> fictional idea of
> > purity or vague worry of feature bloat(as others have
> mentioned)
>
> My worry is not vague at all. What stops one from adding 
> emailing ability to the compiler then? That would be immensely 
> useful too becaues the compiler could email me. (!) Where is 
> the line?
>
> A compiler is a tool that compiles source code in a preset 
> environment. Simple is better.
>
> > especially in a case like this where the implementation is
> fairly simple
> > and the use cases are immense.
>
> The use cases are not immense compared to the current 
> situation. There are lots of free tools that can set the 
> environment for compilation and the compiler compiles.
>
> Ali

The use cases I am more interested in are not possible with make. 
Having the ability to pass the arguments from within the language 
itself allows you to define your use cases inline instead of 
having to separately define the use case outside. Something where 
you would have many different points in the code that needed 
different input from what ever executable you were calling. With 
out ctec you would have to maintain a list of every time you 
needed something generated from the outside and add that to your 
make which is error prone. I think it is in these cases where the 
ctec would be the most useful as it would remove a lot of the 
burden of keeping track of all the pregenerated code.