Is metaprogramming useful?

[Charles D Hixson]

Steve Horne wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:28:15 +0100, "Frank Benoit (keinfarbton)"
> <benoit at tionex.removethispart.de> wrote:
> 
>> Well, D might be faster, but it shows that the compile time can increase
>> very fast.
> 
> When doing the metaprogramming, the compiler is basically acting as an
> interpreter as opposed to a compiler. It is nothing more advanced or
> freaky than that.
> 
Interesting...particularly as what I really want is basically 
the opposite.  I expect PyD to just exactly fill my needs in a 
few more months.  Currently I'm working in Python, and my only 
option has been Pyrex (not a bad choice in itself!), but PyD 
should be a much better choice, as D is a better underlying 
match to Python than C is, and what I'll be doing is largely 
translating chunks of Python into a compilable language for speed.

Of course, what would be really interesting would be a runtime 
version of D, with runtime type assignment, etc., but without 
the kind of bloat that would occur if this were done with 
templates.

(OTOH, I must admit that I'm guessing at the amount of bloat 
that a generic template would add.  They don't add that much 
in Eiffel or Ada code, but they were impossibly bloated the 
last time I tried it in C++ [admittedly that's over a decade 
ago].)