Calling std.variant.visit from a pure function

Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d-learn digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com
Thu Nov 3 19:56:07 PDT 2016


As a learning exercise, I'm writing a simple AST evaluator for 
arithmetic expressions in D. (See 
https://gist.github.com/ckirkendall/2934374) In order to get a 
feel for functional programming in D, I decided to try and 
implement my solution in a functional style, using algebraic data 
types and pure functions.

Here's the code:

import std.variant;
import std.typecons;

enum Op { Plus, Minus, Times, Div }

alias Expr = Algebraic!(
     double,
     string,
     Tuple!(Op, "op", This*, "lhs", This*, "rhs")
);


double eval(Expr expr, double[string] env) pure {
     return expr.visit!(
         (double x) pure => x,
         (string v) pure => env[v],
         (Tuple!(Op, "op", Expr*, "lhs", Expr*, "rhs") bop) pure {
             final switch (bop.op) with (Op) {
             case Plus:
                 return eval(*bop.lhs, env) + eval(*bop.rhs, env);
                 break;
             case Minus:
                 return eval(*bop.lhs, env) - eval(*bop.rhs, env);
                 break;
             case Times:
                 return eval(*bop.lhs, env) * eval(*bop.rhs, env);
                 break;
             case Div:
                 return eval(*bop.lhs, env) / eval(*bop.rhs, env);
                 break;
             }
         }
     )();
}

When I compile this (using DMD 2.069 on Debian Linux), I get an 
error saying that I can't call visit from a pure function. This 
is surprising, since all visit does (in theory) is call the 
provided functions, and all of _them_ are pure.

My question is, is this an unavoidable limitation of visit's 
implementation, or is there a way to work around this?


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