Oh, I like this idea! I had very briefly considered treating the existing flag as a bitfield, but then promptly forgot to explore that line of thought further. I'll play with that approach next week, see where it takes me, and then report back. Thanks so much for taking the time to think this through with me – much appreciated. Cheers, --diana On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 1:33 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
2. We could reinterpret "optimize" as a bitfield instead of a regular integer, special casing the already defined values:
- all zero: no optimizations - sign bit set: negative -> use global settings - 0x0001: nodebug+noassert - 0x0002: nodebug+noassert+nodocstrings - 0x0004: nodebug - 0x0008: noassert - 0x0010: nodocstrings
The "redefine optimizations as a bitfield" approach seems particularly promising to me - it's a full integer, so even with all negative numbers disallowed and the two low order bits reserved for the legacy combinations, that's still 29 different optimisation flags given 32-bit integers. We currently have 3, so that's room for an 866% increase in the number of defined flags :)