I think you're missing the point. The idea is simply that anything you can do via code generation could be done using subroutines instead, provided you are using a high-level dynamic language like Perl. In addition, your examples are mostly not what I would call code generation. Generating a lookup table from an HTML page is basically data manipulation and could be done as a config file rather than code. Generating documentation is, well, documentation. It's human-readable text, so you can't handle it as a library call the way you could with other code generation situations. I don't know enough about XSUB to comment on your last example, except to say that the rules are different in static languages like C where you really may not be able to do certain things as a subroutine.

The canonical example for this discussion is generating a set of classes for manipulating database tables. Class::DBI does this in perl, and it uses code generation, but it does the generation on the fly at run-time and doesn't produce an intermediary source code that can be hand-edited and get out of sync. The use is still questionable in my opinion, but not as bad as it could be.

In reply to Re^3: (OT) Generated Code vs. Libraries by perrin
in thread (OT) Generated Code vs. Libraries by Mutant

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