Re: #defines in 4gl

In article <1ttg96INNiat@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> archer!ciesla@stairs.att.com writes: >Fellow 4GL developers: > >For years, I've wished 4GL had a feature that would allow the >use of #define, #ifdef, #else, #include, . . . > >Has anyone figured out a way to do this in spite of Informix? And you folks >at Informix: Why has this feature never been supported in the language? We have a little trick we use around here, and it goes a little like this: - Pick a convention which substitutes for # in regular C code (we usually pick ! ) which will act as the first character of the line. For example you might have !include filename in a 4gl program. - Write an awk or sed script which puts a blank line at the beginning of every line which starts with "#". Thus "# comment" would become " # comment". After that the script should substitute every occurance of "!" at the beginning of a line with a "#", thus "!define" becomes "#define". The script should then save the contents into a new file. - run cpp on the new file which will now see the #define's created by your script and act on them accordingly. - Compile your 4gl program and have a nice day