Proposal: First class types (at compiletime)

[Stefan Koch]

On Friday, 21 July 2023 at 12:42:06 UTC, Commander Zot wrote:

>
> thx. but as i understand it, this is quite different then what 
> i proposed, right?
> my proposal doesn't implement 'type functions' as a special 
> kind of function, it just uses TypeInfo as a parameter and 
> return type.
>
> so my idea would be to allow any type to implicitly convert to 
> it's TypeInfo when a type is used in a expression.
> and any TypeInfo to be converted back to it's type when 
> assigned to an alias.
> TypeInfo[] should be converted back to an AliasSeq of those 
> types.

In order to convert TypeInfo[] into real types you need to build 
special code into the compiler.
The information contained in TypeInfo[] is not by itself enough 
to create a type.
All of the transformation on types or TypeInfo need to be 
threaded through the compiler.