Mercury Code Generation Tools

This main purpose of this application was to help me learn Mercury and at the same time produce some tools that would be useful on that journey.

I assume that you have a fully working installation of mercury on your system and all accessible from the command line. The Makefile was generated by this application once I had written it, sure it might seem overkill for a single file application, after all mmc --make is all you need in that case but you never know when a project will grow and being able to clean the directory too is nice.

Change History

19 Nov 2021: Revamped with everything I've learned in the last few months!

• Hopefully more idiomatic code.
• Use of custom command type.
• Improved content of main().
• Makefile tweaks (-E added)

Building

It really couldn't be simpler, if you DON'T have make installed then just use

mmc mcnew.m

and then copy the executable somewhere on your path so you can use it from any folder going forward.

If you do have make installed then it's even easier just type make!

make install

That's it, all done, ready to use.

Usage

There are two commands available and they both take the basic name of the module, let's call it foo. If you enter foo.m then be prepared for interesting times ahead. If you don't pipe the output to a file then by default it just gets written to stdout and then you could cut and paste it from the terminal window into a file or whatever you want to do.

Environment Variables

If this is only ever used by you, you can set an environment variabled like so and this will be automatically used to fill in the [author] slot. If you don't provide an author and one is not passed on the command line it remains blank.

export MCNEW_AUTHOR="Your name here"

Create a Module

To create a stubbed out -main- application:

mcnew stub foo [author]> foo.m

The reason I don't save to a file explicitly in the code is because I wanted to keep it simple! Otherwise I would have had to get into the file system libraries, that will come. Indeed I may well extend this utility over time to include that sort of thing.

Create a Makefile

If you want a makefile to go with your new project then issue:

mmcnew makefile foo [author] > makefile

And you are done. As your project grows all you have to do as add the new source file names to the DEPS variable and the make magic should take care of the rest.

Makefile Targets

Stock build:

$ make

Install to your local $BIN folder (*nix only), no idea how it would go on Windows!

$ make install

The value of $HOME/bin is used as the target for the copy.