D community's view on syntactic sugar

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2018-06-16 07:48, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:

> If only D hadn't given up on the AST macros idea, we could actually
> implement most of this sugar AS A LIBRARY SOLUTION, just like modern D
> wants.
>
> AST macros are seriously awesome though:
>
> There's this one CLR language, Nemerle, kind of obscure (and kind of
> dead-ish now unfortunately), that has this one really weird, stupid
> limitation: If you want an "if" statement WITHOUT an "else", you have to
> say "when" instead of "if". Stupid idea. *BUT* the language supports AST
> macros. So in 12 lines of code (Yes, twelve!!!!), I added support for
> "if without else"...IN LIBRARY!!
>
> https://github.com/Abscissa/plainIf/blob/master/plainIf.n
>
> Seriously, AST macros turn a language into "LISP without
> parenthesis-hell". So freaking awesome. Wish D hasn't given up on them
> in favor of ugly unhygienic string mixins.

A couple of years ago I started trying to implement AST macros [1], it's 
pretty stale now.

[1] https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dmd/tree/macro

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg