My Meeting C++ Keynote video is now available

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Wednesday, 16 January 2019 at 05:32:51 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 1/15/2019 10:39 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Perhaps we shouldn't support user defined types or functions 
>> either ;)
>
> You deliberately wrote that, and I'm confident you'd never try 
> to pass that off as good work.
>
> With macros, however, programmers are convinced they are 
> creating models of clarity. I've seen programmers truly believe:
>
>     #define BEGIN {
>     #define END }
>
> improves their C code. Fortunately, that was ridiculed out of 
> existence in the 1980s, but the more subtle abuses persist with 
> their ardent defenders. I used to use a lot of macros in my C 
> code, and a few years back made an effort to remove them all 
> from the dmd source code. The result was very satisfactory.
>
> I've seen entire code bases abandoned because of macros after 
> the original developer left.

I'm pretty sure Jacob is talking about a completely different 
type of macro (i.e. not textual substitution), AST macros.
I'd be interested to see how close we could get if we allowed 
mixin template to contain expression as well as declarations 
(obviously these could only be instantiated in function 
contexts). Anyway something to play around with at DConf.