D-etractions A real world programmers view on D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-09-04 21:39, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 September 2012 at 19:18:05 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> I've also wished quite many times I had dynamic typing in D.
>
> I think we're *fairly* close with things like std.variant,
> especially combined with some helpers. Take a look:
>
> Variant a = 10;
> string b = a; // can't, and I say that's good, usually
> b = a.coerce!string; // works
>
> But, to get a dynamic feel, you don't want to write
> out coerce!type. I kinda want it to be auto. So,
>
> Variant a = 10;
> string b;
>
> b.dset = a; // dset means dynamic set
>
> This is pretty doable in D today.

When I said "dynamic typing" that was a bit misleading. It's more the 
dynamic nature of Ruby I like. For example:

* Open classes
* Reflection - adding methods, calling a method via a string, introspection
* Have executing code in all level of scopes
* Eval

The comparable features in a static language would probably AST-macros, 
annotations and similar features. If D had those features then I 
probably wouldn't want dynamic typing that much.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg