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I concur - do what you like in generated code - it's generated, not for reading or modifying!
Just don't forget the big "Keep your stinking paws of this code you dirty ape!" notice at the top!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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As long as the generation tool is capable enough that I never have to hand edit its results I really don't care what all is inside the sausage factory. When the generation falls short and I need to hand-edit the results or worse write a fix tool, the nastier the generated output is the more I'll hate the guilty party.
The flip side is when it is simultaneously simple enough in scope and capable enough in function to ingest my modifications without problem for round trip modifications (*cough*WinForm Designer*cough*) that I'll fall in love and still be mourning not having anything equivalent in newer projects (web, wpf, uwp, android, ios) years later.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Round tripping was cool even if it wasn't perfect. It was the (almost) perfect solution to providing VB6 style designer functionality without making it opaque like VB6 did.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I'm too do a lot of generated code (mostly JS as today)...
The only comment I add is a warning about the changes one thinks to make - futile (especially when I minimize the generated code  )...
I try to generate optimized code, so I will use variables for constants I reuse in the code, others will be in-place...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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I try to generate somewhat "portable", optimized code in that order. By portable in .NET i mean code dom constructs that work for most if not all languages. Sometimes that means trading against optimization but it's usually worthwhile if you're making a tool for general purpose use like a parser generator, as long as the hit isn't that big, or somewhere time critical.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I have an app that generates models and (optionally) viewmodels from stored procs in the seleted database.
In both entity types, I give the user the opportunity to specify namespaces, and base classes (that the generator does not create).
All generated model and viewmodel entities are generated as public partial, and all properties are virtual, with a comment that reminds the coder that the model/viewmodel in question is generated, and that any changes to the generated file(s) will be lost if they regenerate the entity, and further, and changes should be made to either a partial extension file, or inside an deriving class.
For the record, my app does it better than the ado.net project template, and is SIGNIFICANTLY less buggy or finicky. Beyond that, once you click the generate button, it creates all of the entities in less than 5 seconds in a database with over 200 stored procs.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Nice. I used to write tools like that back when i was doing this professionally. Part of me misses it. Part of me is glad i don't have to deal with that crap anymore. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Just make sure to add some attributes so designers know not to check the code for style issues.
I think the GeneratedCodeAttribute does that in .NET.
Nothing is worse than having some blue information and yellow warning icons for stuff you can't change 
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Fair enough. I always mean to but sometimes I forget. Lately I've been pretty hardcore about warnings and documentation but I forget those silly messages.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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The thing is, I don't know that I can easily add that feature. All this really is is some code to help you write code generators. It's not a code generator.
It's an attempt to make the codedom not kill your fingers, and actually make it vaguely readable.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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If you generate code that I can't touch, but that will sit around in my project you owe it to all that's good and holy to add that attribute.
God kills a puppy every time you generate production code without that attribute 
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That's true but this is not a code generator. It's just a wrapper for the codeDom. It's up to the user of it to add that attribute
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I gave up many years ago attempting to write a silver bullet code generator. I use a start and end token, anything inside the tokens is fair game for the ClassBuilder, if I need to customise some code I move it outside the tokens.
I find this an excellent compromise that allows ClassBuilder to do the grunt work and I only have to do the custom stuff.
I run screaming from any proposed rules engine solution although I have written a number of them over the years I have never been satisfied with the results.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I agree, except that I've never experienced a code generation tool that actually handles all the edge cases, which means I end up generating the code once and manually tweaking it as needed. Yeah, that's bad I suppose, but what are you going to do when years later nobody can even figure out what the tool was that generated to code to begin with? 
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I've had experiences with parser code generated by Antlr (version 2, not the current one) and controller code generated from Simulink diagrams. My main feels from those are:
- Comments documenting traceability from the source specification to the generated code are very useful when debugging (which I've had to do in both cases)
- Use variable names that reflect the names used in the source specification, for similar reasons as 1.
- Personally, I'd prefer not to see
gotos, because I find they make code comprehension harder, but that's just my opinion.
And no, I never modify generated code - that's never a sustainable route to take.
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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That's fair, although compilable state machines basically require gotos as they become spaghetti that's impossible to represent with nested loops and such.
What I do in my FSM code, is I created code to render state machine graphs as jpgs so I can see them.
Each state is labeled. Each jump label matches the label in the diagram. Each arrow in the diagram matches a jump.
It's about the best one can hope for.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Fair enough - the other approach for finite automata (from my fading memory of using Yacc, back in the day) is to use a table driven approach, which is even less scrutable than using gotos!
Antlr, as it generates recursive descent parsers, is pretty well suited to the 'generate structured code' thing, although I think the later versions generate table driven code for improved performance...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Agreed. I use table driven code generally for the same reason ANTLR does - performance. I've noticed that large state machines run faster table driven than compiled. Some of my projects however, generate both. =)
I've tried generating compiled parsers as well, and the performance was a dog. I won't write code that generates those anymore. It's like giving someone a lit firecracker - there's nothing good that will come of it and it will blow up in someone's face.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I learned table driven state machines by studying the ITU X.225 Session Layer Protocol. I don't think this can be understood by any other technique! It is extremely complex, but the tables give you a fast way to see what happens next, in any state, when whatever happens. Most of all: You become aware of all protocol error situations in a very lucid way.
I was so fascinated by this extremely compact, extremely complete, extremely fast lookup way of describing a protocol, and I have never understood why not "everybody" uses this format.
Well, I guess I do know... Almost all programmers I have met prefer to delay error handling, robustness, exceptional cases until the main body of the code is in place. "Agile" insistutionalizes this approach: Defer whatever can be deferred, get "something" up and running as fast as possible. Developing state tables forces you to consider all possibilites, handle all cases (or at least: An empty square means "This error is not yet being handled, or it is fatal". Thorough understanding of what you are developing is more or less a contradiction to agile philosophy.
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I render my state machines to images. As seen in the article images here: How to Build a Regex Engine in C#[^]
That's also how I learned how these FA state machines work. These visual aids are invaluable.
God bless GraphViz. =) I use it under the hood for my state machine rendering code. It helps when I'm debugging them immensely.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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(These figures don't display in Firefox ... Why am I still using that browser? IE11 can handle them, though!)
Sure, blobs and arrows are nice for getting an overview. But only up to a certain complexity. I don't think I would want to learn X.225 from a complete blobs and arrows diagram for the full protocol. Maybe for smaller subsets of the state transitions.
In such diagrams, you usually do not get an overview of error handling; they are definitely best suited for a more or less linear state flow and events that are "well behaved", they come as expected. Obviously you have alternate linear sequences from an initial to a final state, and loopbacks, but in the sample figures there is not one case of crossing lines (transitions). in a large model where you have defined various sorts of exception/error handling, you couldn't hope for avoiding crossing lines. So you simplify the logic, providing a general introduction to the FSM through the figures. But to see the full works, you must go to the state tables.
Actually, I was working on a GraphViz plugin for VisualStudio to make such figures based on the state tables, handled by another plugin, for editing table squares index by state/event, specifying entry conditions (predicates), actions, and next states, as well as tables of predicate definitions and action routines, covering all the requiremets for the X.225 state machine. I had the design ready for a selection mechanism for graphing a selected subset of the state transitions, which labels to add to the graph etc.; your project could contain multiple graph descriptions for different purposes. This was primarity for teaching FSM programming at a Tech University. But then I switched jobs, so the project was never completed. Maybe I should pick it up as a hobby project. Would be fun!
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I ran into that problem too (in chrome) - turn off your ad blocker for this site (adds are minimal, unobtrusive here)
That FSM thing would be fun. I've been kind of doing a subset of it for character based machines.
Although I want to extend it to handle the state machines in LR parser tables. Those are PDAs so they're a bit more complicated - they have a stack.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Hmm. I only have one case in recent memory of generated code where I wrote the generator.
I agree that comments are not terribly useful, as long as you're always using the generator to update the generated code. In the past, I've had the generator include the original text as a comment in the generated stuff as a debugging aid for the generator itself.
Constants depend upon the purpose of the generator and the generated code. In some cases it's simpler to have the compiler compute constant values at compile time than it is to have the generator compute them.
I've not had [what I consider] a reasonable use for goto label in the last 20 years or so. That said, I do use break or continue fairly regularly.honey the codewitch wrote: ow many of you hate me for this, and who agrees with me here?
Don't worry. We have burned a heretic at the stake in days and days [stomps a smoldering ember at his feet].
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: We have burned a heretic at the stake in days and days
I use gotos for two reasons
1) state machine code, although these days i typically do table driven so it's moot. But while loops and such aren't really feasible. I could bore you with some pictures as to why. However, for all my state machines i can generate pretty pictures that graphically and precisely reflect the code that is generated to the point where you can directly see how they line up. The visual aid really helps.
2) To get around a codeDom limitation - it doesn't have break. So I've had to refactor my reference implementations of the code I intend to generate to remove breaks. I've done crazy things like set my i var inside a for loop to int.MaxValue-1 (whatever that works out to be) in my generated code to break the loop. If I can't use a for loop, and I must break, I'll use a goto.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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