compile-time variables?

[Don Clugston]

David B. Held wrote:
> BCS wrote:
>> [...]
>> why is it just char[], why not T[] for any T that can be used by it's 
>> self? I have some cases where I want to do that.
> 
> I don't know the full story, but after looking through the front-end 
> code, my guess is that it's just easier that way.  
 > That is, when
> checking to see whether a particular type can be a compile-time array, 
> it's easier to check against one type than against a set of types, or 
> detect a set of type properties.  Also, since dynamic char[] already 
> violates the purity of metaprogramming, I think that Walter didn't want 
> to expand and encourage that without thinking very hard about it (it's 
> easier to give people new features than to take them away).
> 
> Dave


Nope. It's because D had built-in support for string literals from way 
back (whereas array literals are very recent). Concatenation of string 
literals was accidentally possible, and I showed that it could be used 
to do some interesting metaprogramming. I explicitly asked for the other 
char [] operations to be constant folded at compile time. See the change 
log for around DMD 0.135-0.145 to see the history.