Most elegant way to disable all BASIC functionality?

[Tor Lillqvist]

> How is the Python/Java code disabled from the codebase? Wouldn't it be
> best if BASIC could be disabled in the same way (i.e. a autogen
> option).

The autogen option is just that, an autogen (actually configure)
option. Of course by itself it doesn't do anything. It causes a
setting to be visible to the makefiles that then causes various stuff
to not be built, and another setting to be visible to compilations,
that ifdefs in the code then look for.

Thanks to how the Java and Python support is implemented (no doubt
because the plan from the start has been to keep both optional)
relatively few ifdefs are needed in the code. (I assume; I haven't
actually gone looking that closely.) The BASIC thing is quite
different.

(As such, when I say that making BASIC optional could be done with a
"lot" of ifdefs, I mean a lot *locally* in some parts of the code; of
course, compared to *all* our codebase, the number of affected files
would in fact be quite small.)

> It might be useful to someone else down the track (not just
> the iOS project) to be able to disable this.

I don't know. I *personally* think we have *too many* configure-time
choices. But hey, it's not I who decide;) We accept patches very
easily, it wouldn't take much for somebody to convice us that they
want such a configure option, so once it is technically possible to
bypass BASIC on the code level, sure, if somebody submits a patch we
can make it a configure-time option (instead of just being
iOS-specific).

--tml