compile time class introspection?

[Bent Rasmussen]

It's impossible to generalize that all powerful techniques should be 
language features. I think you have to be more pragmatic than that. How 
foundational is a technique. What is gained by making it a language feature. 
Those kinds of questions need to be asked first, in my humble oppinion.


"Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:f4tf70$2afa$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
>
> janderson wrote:
>> Serg Kovrov wrote:
>>> Beginning of the thread is in digitalmars.D.learn
>>>
>>> Chris Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
>>>> This is an important thing about D that probably deserves a long and 
>>>> extensive tutorial somewhere...  Many of its cooler features aren't 
>>>> really features at all, but side-effects of other more general 
>>>> features.  So, to reuse this same example, no D doesn't have a way to 
>>>> ask if a class or structure has a particular method.  D /does/ have a 
>>>> way to check for valid types... which, incidentally, non-existant 
>>>> members are invalid types.  So, voila, a side-effect of checking its 
>>>> type is that you confirm it exists.
>>>>
>>>> There are others... a plethora, even.  Walter is fond of lots of small 
>>>> things that can be put together to achieve amazing things -- 
>>>> and I don't strictly disagree -- but it isn't usually obvious what you 
>>>> can do with those nifty little gadgets.
>>>>
>>>> -- Chris Nicholson-Sauls
>>>
>>> This is really sad that it turned this way. As I understand Walter 
>>> himself criticizes such approach:
>>>
>>> "Many useful aspects of C++ templates have been discovered rather than 
>>> designed."
>>>
>>
>> I think its great in C++ that you can do more with it then indented. Why 
>> limit the programmers imagination?  Sure some hacks should be program 
>> features, like the static_assert.  However, I think its great that you 
>> could have static assets in C/++ at all.  In fact many of the 
>> "improvements" D has are from some great ideas programmers "hacked" into 
>> C++.
>>
>
> IMHO:
>
> That's not too bad when your experimenting.
>
> But it's really really bad for a programming language that is being used 
> for commercial applications.