Is D more cryptic than C++?

[bcs]

On 11/30/2011 08:32 PM, Abrahm wrote:
> "Jesse Phillips"<jessekphillips+d at gmail.com>  wrote in message
> news:jb6qfv$1kut$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> What bearophile was referring to was the use of templates is common.
>
> Are you sure about that? What say you Bear?
>
>> D's
>> templates have the advantage of being easier on the eyes and more
>> powerful (with the inclusion of 'static if' in the language).
>
> Having "come from" C++land, and knowing what some people do with it,
> making it EASIER to apply templates does not seem necessarily a good
> thing to me. (Ref: template metaprogramming). That said, does your
> statement above about D's template machinery being "powerful" etc., mean
> "it's easier to do template metaprogramming in D"? If so, I, personally,
> do not find that any asset at all (though I know some surely will, for
> there have been books written on that "abhorrence").
>

Most of the argument for template metaprogramming being a bad thing in 
C++ are just flat not valid in D. That is not by chance. While designing 
the D template system they (including the guy who wrote one of these 
books you mention) took as look at what people actually want to do with 
all that abhorrence and provided a sane way to do it. With one 10th the 
complexity, D can do 10 times as much.

As a specific example, one of the most abhorrent bits of D template code 
I've worked with is a compile time parser generate that, at compile 
time, parses a string into an AST describing the grammar that it will 
then generate a recursive decent parser to parse. All in under 1-2kLOC. 
Version 2 was going to include the ability to automatically reactor out 
left recursion so that it could handle the D grammar as documented. Even 
at the level of complexity, it wasn't really that hard to comprehend. 
The same end effect is available in C++ but takes a megabyte and a half 
of header files.