Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:h8d7tu$1799$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Semicolons are noise, they slow down programming a little.
>

That's *very* programmer-dependent. It originally took took me all of about 
a week to get used to semicolons after growing up on basic (and even then it 
was a very very minor time sink), and now just it takes all of about a split 
second to press that key. But, any time I use a language that doesn't allow 
semicolon line endings, I keep sticking them in without even thinking about 
it. Then the compiler complains, and I have to go back and fix it, and that 
slows down programming more than just instinctively hitting a key.

>
>> Read Cedric's blog June 2008 for example
>> http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000490.html
>
> The comments to that blog post are more intelligent and useful than the 
> main post. See for example the comment by Amit Patel.
>

Thanks for pointing that out. That's a *very* good comment. And interesting 
too because he talks about using switch for parsers (although actually, so 
does the original article) and just the other day I was making an 
implementation of Haxe's proprocessor. I ended up with code like this:

switch(directive)
{
case "#if":
...
case "#elseif":
...
case "#else":
...
case "#end":
...
case "#error":
...
default:
...
}

Works fine. When I originally read that article, although I understood his 
point and agree there are (pardon the puns) many cases for which switch is 
the wrong choice, I was thinking "What, am I *really* supposed turn those 
strings into polymorphic objects? What a pedantic waste!"