Module name compile time constant?

[Yigal Chripun]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Simen Kjaeraas wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:56:32 +0200, Spacen Jasset
>> <spacenjasset at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> davidl wrote:
>>>> 在 Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:12:13 +0800，Janice Caron
>>>> <caron800 at googlemail.com> 写道:
>>>>
>>>>> On 15/04/2008, davidl <davidl at 126.com> wrote:
>>>>>>  I want some magic of module.name to get the current module name
>>>>>> in compile
>>>>>> time string form.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, basically you want to add __MODULE__ to the list of "special
>>>>> tokens" in
>>>>> http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/lex.html
>>>>>
>>>>> I think it would be easy for Walter to add, and I don't think it's
>>>>> particularly controversial, so why not just go ahead and add an
>>>>> enhancement request to Bugzilla.
>>>>  I'm looking for a cleaner solution.
>>>> __SPEC_TOKEN__ for me looks like a hack.
>>>>  and it's not so well defined if my app doesn't have a module
>>>> declaration section?
>>>> should the compiler stop the compilation?
>>>>
>>> __MODULE__ seems reasonable to me. It's in line with __FILE__ and
>>> __LINE__ and __FUNC__ (which seems absent, from dmd 1 anyway)
>>>
>>> If you have no module definition, then presumably it could be "" or
>>> whatever module the compiler considers it is when that happens
>>> according to the current rules.
>>>
>>> They look a bit like C preprocessor type macros, but really they
>>> aren't so much, at any rate there is none of the problems you get
>>> with C style macros and so they don't seem like a hack to me.
>>>
>>> What alternative did you have in mind?
>>
>>
>> One could argue that a more D-style way to do it would be along the
>> lines
>> of preprocessor.line, preprocessor.file, and so on. It looks less like a
>> hack and more like a real part of the language. One could possibly add
>> other things to this preprocessor object as well, for instance a list of
>> version statements, and I'm sure there are other ideas floating around.
>
> +1
>
> Good point!  Maybe it should still have a preprocessor macro feel
> though, with underscores, like
>
>   __ID(line) or __ID__(file), etc. (akin to __traits(...))
>
> I guess pretending it's an object and using . access would be ok too.
>
>   __ID.line or __ID__.file, etc.
>
>
>
> --bb

+2 for the idea, -infinity for the name. D does not have a preprocessor.
IMO, the best way to implement it is to have a defined API for the
compiler and use a Compiler object (just like you have a GC object)
insead of adding various symbols to the language. This way, you can
remove __traits(...) as well as all those __Line__, __File__, etc from
the language as they would become regular methods.

--Yigal

PS - Isn't there something like a stringof property for symbols that
returns a string representation?