HL-ZASM Preprocessor

[suunr]

It would be better if the preprocessor should be executed before any compilation process and not during it. That means that the preprocessor tries to resolve the label, which leads to errors.

#define MY_FUNCTION some_func
[...]

An ANSI-C preprocessor would replace all MY_FUNCTIONs in the source code with some_func. It doesn't throw an error if a function or variable called some_func doesn't exist.
However the HL-ZASM compiler throws an error. This can be annoying if you want to have all #defines before the actual source code.

This idea is taken from an ANSI-C compiler, because the HL-ZASM preprocessor is just poor.

[AbigailBuccaneer]

Is there any case in which the HL-ZASM preprocessor accepts things that the C preprocessor doesn't, or cases in which they both accept it but behave differently?

[suunr]

The HL-ZASM preprocessor has some specific pragma commands (pragma is compiler-specific anyway). Except that there should be nothing which the C preprocessor doesn't have.

[suunr]

What about this https://github.com/willsteel/lcpp? Maybe we could embed it in the compiler.

[oldmud0]

@suunrider Are you sure this library doesn't depend on the presence of LuaJIT?
Hmm... it's just short of 2000 lines.. MIT license, that's compatible.. looks pretty stable... a bit concerned about how __FILE__ would be handled though...

But other than that, I think I'll ✅ support this idea

[suunr]

It works, but there are 2 problems: It doesn't properly check if the first character of line is "#", instead it looks for every single character. The other problem is that it takes much time when compiling >200 lines of code (maybe because it checks for every single character). Setting __FILE__ isn't a big deal

[suunr]

I fixed the first problem, also found out it fixes #619.