Made of Bugs

I’m pretty sure every developer who has ever worked with a modern database-backed application, particularly a web-app, has a love/hate relationship with their ORM, or object-relational mapper. On the one hand, ORMs are vastly more pleasant to work with than code that constructs raw SQL, even, generally, from a tool that gives you an object [...]

Last time, I announced Check Plus, a declarative language for defining Check tests in C. This time, I want to talk about the tricks I used to implement a declarative minilanguage using the C preprocessor (and some GCC extensions). The Problem We want to write some toplevel declarations that look like: #define SUITE_NAME example BEGIN_SUITE(“Example [...]