Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

[Walter Bright]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> Walter, please take a look at the design used by Nemerle.
> The language designers of Nemerle achieved a _very_ pluggable
> architecture via Macros (probably identical to your idea of AST macros).
> their system allows to implement whole subsets of the language
> *including the syntax* as plugins which in D are now part of the
> language. They have DBC, concurrency, etc implemented like that. they
> have a plan to make an AOP plugin as well.
> look at:
> http://nemerle.org/Macros
> http://nemerle.org/Syntax_extensions
> http://nemerle.org/doc/Nemerle.Compiler.html
> etc..

I've heard about nemerle now and then, but have never looked at it. One 
of the problems with a user definable syntax is the code may become 
unreadable. I still find it hard to see how one could implement a const 
type system, for example, as a language extension. It's a lot more than 
just syntax.