Re: Babel: How to call code in one org file into another org file

[Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Saturday, 31 Oct 2015 at 16:51, Lawrence Bottorff wrote:
>> I guess I'm saying that the whole `org-babel-lob-ingest` into
>> `org-babel-library-of-babel` exercise should make code ready and available.
>
> But it does.  There are two levels here: the babel codes and the results
> of the codes.  If your babel codes are emacs which define functions,
> these latter functions are not available until the babel codes are
> executed.  However, the babel codes are now there and ready to be
> executed by name.
>
> I would not want ingest to execute the codes for two reasons: many of
> the codes do not make sense without special arguments and there may be
> many such codes.

Indeed - and just to amplify this a bit, you can arrange (and it's
arguably "better" if you have files whose code blocks you want to reuse)
for all the relevant files to be in org-babel-library-of-babel during
initialization; you do not *need* to have them added through the Local
Variables trick: just add org-babel-lob-ingest calls to .emacs.

You can also add the block evaluations in your .emacs, but that is
probably a bad idea as Eric points out. Instead, use Local Variables
with

eval: (org-sbe "foo")

calls to evaluate just what you need for the current buffer (and make
sure that the relevant inferior process running the language interpreter
is started *before* you open the file: emacs-lisp is exempt, since
it's always there).

The difference of opinion arises in the interpretation of "ready and
available". The LOB in this case (and maybe in all cases, but I haven't
used it often enough to be able to make such a statement) behaves more
like an #include file in C, rather than a library of precompiled code
that you link against (think libc.so or equivalent): you need to
"compile" (i.e. evaluate) the code block before it becomes available
to your code.

-- 
Nick