D seems interesting, but...

[bearophile]

Andrei Alexandrescu:

> Well there's a tension here: good language design generally 
> aims at providing few general features applicable to many use 
> cases. Encoding particular use cases in the language is 
> warranted by either disproportionate frequency in use or 
> disproportionate difficulty in implementing them within the 
> language. I don't think this particular feature scores very 
> highly in either category.

It's a feature that I use about in every Python module/package 
I've written, and it's about as equally used in code you see in 
Python repositories. So it's a common need in Python. I'm asking 
for it for more than three years or so.

And regarding the implementation my "hack" means having a single 
compile-time constant (plus a switch to be used when you want 
partial compilation?). Better designs are possible, but it's a 
matter of how much you want to work for it.

Bye,
bearophile