Newbie initial comments on D language - RTTI and run-time reflection

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Edward Diener" <eddielee_no_spam_here at tropicsoft.com> wrote in message 
news:fnor00$ib9$1 at digitalmars.com...

> Please, no one except a compiler itself parses source code anymore to 
> build a reflection mechanism. If it is not in the compiler, asking a 3rd 
> party mechanism to do it is really beyond the vast majority of 
> programmers' ability. Sorry to be so negative but no other modern language 
> of which I know, which has run-time reflection mechanisms, asks the 
> programmer to go to such lengths. Look at .Net, Java, Python, Ruby, C++ 
> Builder, or Delphi and tell me which ones ask the programmer to parse the 
> language just to reflect on the type and their sub-components.

Except that's exactly how those languages implement such things, and one of 
the driving goals of D is to make it easy to parse and therefore easy to 
write third-party tools for it.  The frontend is open-source and there is in 
fact a project on dsource (http://www.dsource.org/projects/dmdfe) which 
provides the frontend in some kind of manageable form.  Tools such as 
rebuild already use this to parse D code.

Notice that .Net, Java, C++ Builder and Delphi are *aimed* at rapid app 
development and are all supported by major corporations, so of course those 
things are built in, and with Python and Ruby, such things fall out as a 
consequence of how they are implemented.  D is a systems programming 
language aimed at making natively-compiled programs, so runtime reflection 
isn't emphasized nearly as much.  Generation of runtime reflection info is 
not specified in the language spec, and therefore seems to me to be more of 
a quality-of-implementation issue than anything.