This is another thought experiment to get feedback on the syntactic possibilities of VF.

Almost all modern languages have a means of controlling how code gets parsed at compile-time. This usually involves defining constants, testing these constants for a particular value (or just their existence), and possibly generating code or aborting a compile.

VF, so far, can parse the following directives:

• @define constant - defines a constant
  
• @if constant - compiles the following code if constant is defined
  
• @elseif constant - when the preceding @if failed, tests alternative constants
  
• @else - when all preceding @if and @elseif fail, compile the following
  
• @endif - ends a conditional

Conditional compilation is very useful, so debugging information can be omitted for the release compilation for instance.

I like that addition.

My plan for now is to allow some simple logical operations: And, Or, Not.

Code:

@if Windows ' Windows-specific thing @if Win64 ' Win64-specific thing @endif @elseif Linux or MacOS ' *nix-specific thing @if Linux ' Linux-specific thing @if not Ubuntu and not Fedora ' Non-Ubuntu/Fedora-specific thing @endif @elseif MacOS ' MacOS-specific thing @endif @endif

That makes sense too, so specifying a constant for the path separator or path list delimiter would be easy.