Configurable syntax

[bearophile]

Jason House:
> I'd love to see compile-time functions returning types.<

Glad to see my post appreciated :-)


>IMHO, it's far superior to the template-based approach.<

Even if such compile-time functions can't fully replace templates (so templates can't be removed from the language) such functions may be a significant improvement anyway. I have shown some examples in another post.
But for some of those functions you may enjoy having a "static while" too :-)

Probably you can even write things like:

auto foo(type T) {
  static if (T == int)
    return 1;
  else
    return T[];
}


>it's possible for templates to define an instance with unknown type and value. A non-templated function returning either a type or value can't do that.<

Can you explain better or show an example?

Bye,
bearophile