Standalone AA implementation ready for review (Was: Re: Replacing AA's in druntime)

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:05:46 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 3/15/12 11:02 AM, Don Clugston wrote:
>> This is good, and very, very important. Do *not* make any attempt at
>> compiler integration until it is *completely* ready.
>>
>> This includes AA literals. They need to be accepted somehow. The
>> compiler will give you syntax sugar and *nothing* more.
>> One possibility might be to accept a pair of array literals,
>> representing keys and values.
>> Possibly it should call a CTFE function to convert them into some other
>> form?
>
> Offhand, I think this rewrite should be sufficient:
>
> [e11:e12, e21:e22]
>
> --->
>
> .object.associativeArrayLiteral(e11, e12, e21, e22)
>
> Then type manipulation and template constraints can take care of the  
> rest. Am I missing something?

Wouldn't this require a new template instantiation for each sized AA per  
key/value type?  Or were you planning to use varargs?

So long as the data that is actually passed to the AA is on the stack (and  
simply a slice is passed), I like Don's idea better.

-Steve