Manipulating variables without evaluating them

[Salih Dincer]

On Sunday, 7 May 2023 at 17:11:52 UTC, Dadoum wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am currently making a wrapper around libplist in D, and to 
> get a good syntax I first thought about making a `pl` function 
> with bunch of overloads allowing to convert strings, integers, 
> booleans into the corresponding `Plist` type. It is working but 
> the problem here is that associative array literals are not 
> preserving order (they are immediately hashed, and so all the 
> keys are in a random order).

It's hard to figure out what you want but there are errors in 
your code. This works:

```d
auto plistDict(alias AA)()
{
   auto dict = new string[AA.length];
   foreach (key, value; AA)
   {
     dict[key] = value;
   }
   return dict;
}

import std.stdio;

void main()
{
   auto plist = plistDict!([0: "zero",
                            1: "one",
                            2: "two"]);
   plist.writeln; // ["zero", "one", "two"]
}
```

And yes, the data is not converted at compile time.

SDB at 79