A Perspective on D from game industry

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 04:16:43PM +1200, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 17/06/2014 3:05 a.m., H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> >I would personally avoid using string mixins unless there's
> >absolutely no other way to achieve what you want -- they're a kind of
> >last-resort nuclear warhead that you don't bring out unless all the
> >other guns fail to win the battle.
> 
> I have a rule about string mixins which I believe to be a good one to
> follow:
> If using string mixins, don't expose it to client code unless they
> explicitly want it.
> Basically what this means is, use something to wrap it like a mixin
> template but don't just say hey call this function and use it as a
> string mixin!  Its a little nicer. Also the explicit getting of the
> string is important for debugging. Sometimes its needed for the more
> complex cases in edge cases/broken functionality. I use it during
> development (a simple pragma msg inside the mixin template for
> example).

Hmm, you know what would be really nice? If there was a way to get at
the string representation of the fully-expanded form of instantiated
templates as the compiler sees them before handing them off to codegen.
Well, OK, I know that's not how the compiler does it, but still,
something equivalent to this would be very handy for debugging
deeply-nested templates that currently would just spew walls of
incomprehensible errors.


> But in saying this, some of this could be handled by opDispatch. Its
> just a shame that both approaches currently aren't handled for
> auto-completion by any IDE's. I would expect the string mixin would be
> one day.
[...]

String mixins? Auto-completion? I dunno, that sounds like a stretch to
me. How would an IDE handle autocompletion for things like like:

	string generateCode() {
		string code = "int x=";
		if (solveFermatsLastTheorem()) {
			code ~= "1";
		} else {
			code ~= "2";
		}
		code ~= ";";
		return code;
	}
	int func() {
		mixin(generateCode());
	}

?


T

-- 
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? -- Erich Schubert