On 4 May 2004 11:03:40 -0700, mhyoung@yahoo.com (Marc) wrote or quoted

The problem with such tools always come when you need to do something
just outside what it can automatically generate. Then you often find
it is harder to patch its code than to start from scratch.    Usually
they generate pretty ugly code which is not a good starting point to
extend from, but they can at last show you A way to do something.  As
long as you stick to their realm, they will be much easier than
writing from scratch.

I did such tools circa 1970. My approach was to provide macros, so
that you were coding in PL/I with assists.  That meant the full power
of the language was always available.  I did not box you in.  I would
gradually add more macros as I discovered common tasks that were
tedious to code manually.

By macros I don't be MASM macros, but intelligent code that expanded
small amounts of information into great fluffy hunks of code, perhaps
interspersed with the output of other macros.

I use a similar concept on my website today with HTML macros written
in Java to do the expansions.  You can see how much computation goes
into some of the expansions.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.