Ematter edition copyright oreilly associates

• There is no safe way to access a slot of the structure. Any typographical error in either part of the variable name yields the wrong value (or no value) with no warning from make.

But the remote-file function hints at a more comprehensive solution. Suppose we implement structure instances using computed variables. Early Lisp object systems (and even some today) used similar techniques. A structure, say file-info, can have instances represented by a symbolic name, such as file_info_1.

Elements of a file-info can be accessed using Lisp-like getters and setters:

path := $(call get-value,before_foo,path)
$(call set-value,before_foo,path,/usr/tmp/bar)

$(call defstruct,file-info, \
$(call defslot,path,), \
$(call defslot,type,unix), \
$(call defslot,host,oscar))

Here, the first argument to the defstruct function is the structure name, followed by a list of defslot calls. Each defslot contains a single (name, default value) pair.

Example B-1. Structure definition in make (continued)

# all_structs - a list of the defined structure names
all_structs :=

# $(call new, struct_name)
define new
$(strip \ $(if $(filter $1,$(all_structs)),, \ $(error new on unknown struct '$(strip $1)')) \ $(eval instance := $1@$(next-id)) \ $(eval all_instances += $(instance)) \ $(foreach v, $($(strip $1)_def_slotnames), \ $(eval $(instance)_$v := $($(strip $1)_def_$v_default))) \ $(instance))
endef

# $(call delete, variable)
define delete
$(strip \ $(if $(filter $($(strip $1)),$(all_instances)),, \ $(error Invalid instance '$($(strip $1))')) \ $(eval all_instances := $(filter-out $($(strip $1)),$(all_instances))) \ $(foreach v, $($(strip $1)_def_slotnames), \ $(eval $(instance)_$v := )))
endef