Preferably done in such a way that the actual source code doesn't look much different (defines? typedefs?).

That seems like an aweful lot of work; and it makes things more confusing for new developers. But then again, I tend to favor less magic in these matters :)

Bill

#ifdef COMPATIBILITY_SHORTHAND #define foobar Pike_foobar #define gazonk Pike_gazonk ... #endif

I'm actually not in favor of that. Changing the source code is a one time effort; providing a compatibility layer is magic that we're (albeit optionally) forced to deal with for the foreseeable future.

I understand that it would be a pain to update source code (and I have many thousands of lines of it myself), I think this is one of those situations where compatibility may not be the best thing.

Besides, if you're going to the trouble of generating a header that provides the mapping, why not just add it to an rsif script or something like that?

Bill

This work is needed to provide source code compatibility with external modules.

That seems like a reasonable approach.

We have been doing this gradually for a long time, so the compatibility is worth it. When everyone agrees it's finished we could perhaps remove the compatibility layer in the next minor.

The idea is that COMPATIBILITY_SHORTHAND should be defined when compiling pike itself (and its modules), but not when compiling the code which wants to use pike as an embedded language. Thus we don't pollute the namespace of the embedder.