Why I love D: function parameter reification

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2022 at 11:43:36AM +0000, bauss via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 June 2022 at 11:39:35 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> > On Thursday, 9 June 2022 at 08:19:05 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
> > > I still think that being able to reflect ddoc comments will be a
> > > huge win ... a-la-python-"__doc__"
> > 
> > Yes, indeed, I've requested this several times, it is useful for a
> > bunch of things like this. There were PRs adding
> > `__traits(docComment, symbol)` to get it too, but rejected by people
> > who don't use D in the real world. Alas.
> 
> I really can't see any reason to reject it, it's not like it'll impact
> anything at all really.

In theory, you could insert code in your ddoc and use introspection to
mix it into the program and execute it at runtime.


> But it really would be useful for tooling, error messages, validation
> etc.
> 
> Could in theory be used to create automated unittests by extracting
> code examples from the docs.

Yes, this would be an awesome application.  Though, for the most part,
it has already been covered by ddoc'd unittest blocks.


T

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