Re: [Caml-list] weird behavior with camlp4o

["Olivier Andrieu" <oandrieu@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 9:29 AM,  <forum@x9c.fr> wrote:
> Selon "Andrew I. Schein" <andrew@andrewschein.com>:
>  > Greetings list -
>  >
>  > I was playing around with OCaml 3.10.2 camlp4o like this:
>  >
>  > camlp4o pa_breakcont.cmo sample1.ml
>  >
>  > with my macro pa_breakcont.cmo and got the expected macro translation
>  > printed to my terminal.  However, when I type:
>  >
>  > camlp4o pa_breakcont.cmo sample1.ml > out.ml
>  >
>  > out.ml contains binary output.  Am I misusing camlp4o?
>
>  I have encountered the same problem a few days ago while working on
>  Ocaml-Java to make it camlp4-compatible.
>
>  The fact is that the kind of output (binary dump of abstract tree or
>  source code in textual form) is chosen according to the nature of the
>  output file descriptor. If the output file descriptor denotes a tty
>  then the textual form is chosen, otherwise the binary form is chosen.
>
>  That being said, I don't know what is the rationale of this choice,
>  as I have not come up with a use case for the binary form.

It's simply more efficient for ocamlc or ocamlopt when camlp4 is
called via the -pp option: no need to pretty-print and then reparse
the source.

-- 
  Olivier