Fully dynamic d by opDotExp overloading

[Christopher Wright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Michel Fortin wrote:
>> On 2009-04-18 22:21:50 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu 
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:
>>
>>> I did, but sorry, it doesn't make sense and does nothing but continue 
>>> the terrible confusion going in this thread.
>>
>> Then let's try to remove some of that confusion.
> 
> Thanks for doing so. Given that my wits are spent with regard to this 
> thread, I am replying out of respect for the considerable effort you 
> have put in writing an explanation.
> 
> I agree that method names swallowed by opDotExp will not be exposed to 
> any reflection mechanism and that that can be a drawback. But sometimes 
> you don't even want to exhaustively generate all method names. In the 
> Pascalize example, you wouldn't want to generate all case combinations 
> of your methods. Also in the swizzle example, maybe you don't want to 
> compulsively expose all of the xyzw combinations.
> 
> You completely lost me about the necessity of a standardized catch-all 
> function. My view is that if you want to forward to someone else, you 
> just call the runtime invoke() for the guy you want to forward to. So I 
> see exactly zero need for a standardized catch-all, and a red herring in 
> the discussion about the syntactic help brought about by opDotExp.

The utility is when you are looking for methods to invoke via runtime 
reflection, you can determine that a given function is one of these 
runtime opDotExp equivalents.

I don't know how useful this is, in point of fact. Unless there's a 
standard system in D for integrating with scripting languages, anyway.