method_missing, C style

Given: We need to interface to communication in S-expressions. In C. We are given a library that does the communication and S-expr representation in some C data structure. We expect commands like

(get "file" 2500 250)

that is, read from a given file at given position and length, and return the data.

Now, doing this based on elementary functions like sexprIsCons() and sexprGetCar() is pretty unwieldy. It would be much nicer to simply do

const char *file;
int pos, len;
if (fs_ps_get_SII (sx, file, pos, len)) {
  unsigned char *bp;
  int blen;
  get_data (file, pos, len, &bp, &blen); // TODO: error handling
  return fs_mk_SBy (file, bp, blen);
}

We’d like to have one function that parses the incoming S-expression into some variables, and another to compose the reply. (The fs_ prefix is used since this is C and its usual method of namespacing.)

Now, we could go along and implement those functions by hand. But, since we even encoded the exact data types we expect into the function names, we could just as well generate them. The namespace prefix and the _mk_ (make) and _ps_ (parse) prefixes suffice as a discriminator against catching other names, and thus we can just scan the whole source file(s) for these patterns and generate the according functions. Voilà, auto-generation of missing functions.

Note: The _ps_ functions are actually macros; otherwise we’d need to pass in the addresses instead of the variables themselves.

Also, instead of scanning the program for magic identifiers beforehand, it would be possible to try to compile the program, and then scan the list of undefined symbols. That would be much closer to method_missing but is also a lot more dependent on compiler and build process.

Exercise for the reader: Also implement command collection so that all functions named fs_cmd_get_XXX are directly put into a command table. Then a server would need only the command implementations itself and the global setup code.