[debate] About D's pretension for homoiconicicity

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Ellery Newcomer" <ellery-newcomer at utulsa.edu> wrote in message 
news:i9pnta$21d$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Then there's the fact that the compiler doesn't represent code as strings. 
> If the compiler exposed the AST, all this might be less of an issue. ASTs 
> aren't a primitive type, but D's library capabilities are strong enough 
> that you might be able to design an AST such that AST manipulation doesn't 
> suck as much as in other c-style languages. It wouldn't be much more 
> readable than string generation, though.
>

I'd love to see D do that (like Nemerle does), although I think the best 
time to do it would be after DDMD becomes the official DMD. That would 
eliminate a lot of extra work since the compiler's AST-related types could 
be made to double as part of the user API.