[erlang-questions] compile module from string, containing macro definitions

[Dominic Williams]

Mats Cronqvist wrote :
> > My suggestion was to improve the ram_file_server, so that you could
> >  take a string representation of code, open it as a ram file, and
> > then use any tool that can operate on a file descriptor (which
> > epp_dodger can, but epp can't).
>
>  improving the ram_file_server might well be useful, but surely the
>  preprocessor should accept a string as input? actually, i think it
>  should accept a token list too.

For what it's worth, I agree with Mats. I am trying to work on a 
development environment for Erlang, and being able to compile and 
pre-process a string directly would be very convenient. What we really 
need is to compile a string to forms (we need the intermediate 
representation, and we can already compile from forms onwards). The 
ram_file_server solution would achieve the same thing (if all tools 
would operate on a file descriptor) but is not as simple.

Regards,

Dominic Williams
http://www.dominicwilliams.net

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