Conditional compilation

[Wcool]

Hi,

From the chapter on internal workings of Perl in the Perl book, I
think it should be possible to conditionally compile something based
on a variable.

I have the following real problem: my code has a lot of statements
that conditionally print a tracing message.
That is based on a command line parameter.

Is it possible during the compilation phase to NOT generate any code
for those statements if that command line is not set.
Example:

sub Trace
{
my ($debug, $msg) = @_;

if ($debug) {
print $msg."\n";
}
}

sub SomeFunc1
{
Trace($opt_d, 'In SomeFunc1');

....

Trace($opt_d, . 'some_var = '.$var1);

...

Trace($opt_d, . 'some_var2 = '.$var2);

etc
}

If opt_d is not set I like the Perl not to generate any code for it
internally (some sort of skip)
The compiler would go through SomeFunc1 at just don't parse the Trace
statement.
This would increase speed of the program (slightly).

Is this possible?

Thanks,

Jeroen

[Frank Seitz]

Wcool wrote:

> Is this possible?

Yes, with a source filter.

$ perldoc perlfilter
Section: USING CONTEXT: THE DEBUG FILTER

Frank
--
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Tel: 04103/180301; Fax: -02; Industriestr. 31, 22880 Wedel

[Ben Morrow]

Quoth Wcool <jeroen.l...@gmail.com>:

The closest to what you are asking for (without getting into seriously
difficult stuff) is to something like this:

use constant DEBUG => $opt_d;

use Carp;

sub Trace {
my ($msg) = @_;
carp $msg; # carp will send the message to STDERR, and
# report it from the point of view of your
# caller.
}

sub SomeFunc1 {
Trace('in SomeFunc1') if DEBUG;
}

Perl will optimize out the Trace calls at compile time, since the
condition is a compile-time constant.

HOWEVER, there is a problem here: the value of $opt_d has to be known at
compile time. This means that your getopt call (or whatever) will have
to be in a BEGIN block.

Also note that the $opt_x interface to Getopt::Std (assuming that's what
you're using) is a bad idea. It's much better to pass getopt a hash to
put the options in.

Ben

[Wcool]

Thank you both!

Jeroen