Associative arrays

[Ola Fosheim Grostad]

On Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 09:14:46 UTC, Chris Piker wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 08:22:56 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad 
> wrote:
>> The main reason is that D needs better metaprogramming.
>
> That's an interesting take.
>
> So far, with only a month's usage of D I'm seeing so much 
> meta-programming capability that it actually worries me a bit.  
> With string mixins and so many other meta programming features 
> around I'm starting to think that reading other people's D code 
> is going to be quite difficult, similar to perl.
>
>> Golden design rule: never add language features that can be 
>> done as library constructs, ever.
>
> This sounds like a reasonable position.  Imagine for a second 
> that AAs were implemented as a library.  What would the library 
> equivalent of this:
>
> ```d
> long[string] aea = ["foo": 5, "bar": 10, "baz": 2000 ];
> ```
>
> look like?

It  could look the same, but long[string] would now be a 
shorthand for std.xyz.Map!(long,string) or something like that 
instead of a special case.