Oct 27/05
13:46
13:46
Ah, yes, the holy Grail of programming: Writing software that writes software. Mostly it conjures up visions of films like the Matrix and Terminator series, featuring autonomous soft/hardware gone amok. But some people over at IBM think it’s underestimated:
One of the most under-used programming techniques is writing programs that generate programs or program parts. Learn why metaprogramming is necessary and look at some of the components of metaprogramming (textual macro languages, specialized code generators). See how to build a code generator and get a closer look at language-sensitive macro programming in Scheme.
The actual paper (by Jonathan Bartlett is pretty techy, but interesting:
- The art of metaprogramming, Part 1: Introduction to metaprogramming
- Jack Herrington has an online support site for his book Code generation in action
(via the RSS feed of del.icio.us/tomc, Tom Carden’s interesting bookmarks)
A much more artistic introduction for Ruby based meta-programming is in one of the extra chapters of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.
Now go and meet Dwemthy, IF YOU DARE!
…or start here, if you’re slightly less brave!