README.md

About outline2c

The outline2c utility runs before the regular C or C++ preprocessor. It provides a simple code-generation language based on outlines and code templates. Outlines give a list of items to generate, while code templates describe how to generate each item.

Outline2c helps eliminate redundancy. For example, a program with several settings could list them all in one place:

\ol settings = outline {
  number width;
  number height;
  number speed;
  string username;
  string save_dir;
}

Templates transform outlines into running code:

struct settings {
  \ol for i in settings {
    \ol map i {
      number {int i;}
      string {char *i;}
    }
  }
};

This example produces something like:

struct settings {
  int width;
  int height;
  int speed;
  char *username;
  char *save_dir;
};

The same outline could be again and again to generate the settings GUI, command-line options parser, config-file reader, and so forth. Adding a setting would normally involve editing all these locations, but with outline2c it only involves a one-line change.

Full documentation is in the doc/syntax.md file.

Building outline2c

For Linux:

cd build-gcc
make
sudo make install

Windows users can find Visual Studio 2010 project files in the build-vs2010 folder.