B Revzin - if const expr isn't broken (was Re: My Meeting C++ Keynote video is now available)

Mark smarksc at gmail.com
Sat Jan 19 11:11:13 UTC 2019


On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 20:29:08 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> That would work, but it would also suffer from all the same 
> problems as macro-based programming in C.  The compiler would 
> be unable to detect when you accidentally pasted type names 
> together where you intended to be separate, the strings may not 
> actually represent real types, and generating code from pasting 
> / manipulating strings is very error-prone. And you could write 
> very unmaintainable code like pasting partial tokens together 
> as strings, etc., which makes it hard for anyone else 
> (including yourself after 3 months) to understand just what the 
> code is trying to do.
>
> Generally, you want some level of syntactic / semantic 
> enforcement by the compiler when you manipulate lists (or 
> whatever other structures) of types.
>
>
> T

Well, it's the approach Andrei laid out in his DConf 2018 talk:
https://youtu.be/-0jcE9B5kjs?t=2641

The advantage is how simple it is, and that it only uses existing 
language constructs. But, indeed, the problems you mention are 
not insignificant.


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