The
new primitive of the
StrategoLibrary? generates a new unique name. That is, it generates a string
that is guaranteed not to occur in any live term.
A way of generating a new unique string based on an existing string would
be nice. Something similar to
make-unique: s -> <conc-strings> (s, <new>())
except that this only guarantees that the <new> part is unique; the combined
string could occur somewhere else, right? It would also be helpful if
two calls to make-unique with different base strings didn't affect each
other, so that
<make-unique> "foo" => "foo_0"
<make-unique> "bar" => "bar_0" (instead of "bar_1")
<make-unique> "foo" => "foo_1" (instead of "foo_2")
I often end up generating source files which differ almost only in the names of
temporary variables (generated with "new"), which makes them difficult to
compare with diff(1). If I could generate temporaries based on the name
of another variable (or the function), I could avoid affecting the names
of temporaries in completely unrelated parts of the program I'm working on.
Currently, I sometimes run a sed script to make all generated names identical,
before I diff(1), but that means I
could end up missing a significant
difference.
Looking at ssl/src/string.c, I believe I might be able to come up with an
implementation, but I suspect
EelcoVisser will be able to do it better, and in less
time...
--
OttoSkroveBagge - 05 Feb 2002
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