Fact checking for my talk

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2016 06:43:11 +0000, ZombineDev wrote:
> Well, I guess it would hard for me to convince you if you don't know
> what Design by Introspection means.

Some years ago I was on #d on freenode and someone made a reference to 
high-order functions. I hadn't encountered the term, so I asked about it. 
The person answered that if I didn't know what it meant, I must not use 
high-order functions.

In point of fact I was making moderate use of high-order functions at 
that time, but I hadn't heard that term for it. There is a difference 
between knowing how to do a thing and knowing a specific term for that 
thing.

You still haven't defined the term "design by introspection". Some 
searching around says it's the pattern of:

template Foo(T) {
  static if (is(typeof(T.bar)) {
    // preferred implementation takes advantage of T.bar
  } else {
    // alternate (also correct) implementation
  }
}

For instance, if T is an allocator and it has a `realloc` method, the 
preferred implementation, which uses `realloc`, will be chosen. 
Otherwise, the alternate implementation (which might use a linked list to 
avoid reallocating) will be chosen.

The term was coined by Andrei, and he's had a couple talks about it, but 
nothing around here in the past few months.

This pattern is handy for certain types of library code. It's not 
something that I have much use for.