Partial template function specialization

[Peter Alexander]

Lars T. Kyllingstad Wrote:

> Disclaimer: You didn't say whether you use D1 or D2, but I use D2, so 
> I'll give my answer in D2 code. It is highly likely it will also work in D1.

I'm using neither :)  I'm just considering learning at the moment.


> First of all, I don't know how it is in C++, but in D you rarely write 
> function declarations without definitions. So unless you have a very 
> general function body for your "general case", I'd simply drop it. If 
> you have, the general case looks like this:
> 
>  <snip>
> 
> For more info, check out http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/template.html
> 
> -Lars

Excellent! Thanks a lot. I was hoping that D could overcome this problem.


Ah, one (maybe) final question:

Is there an equivalent to friends in D (didn't see any in the docs)? If so, do they work with templates easily?

In my style of programming, I very rarely use member functions (I think they are an atrocity in language design), so I create global functions for almost everything, and when they need to access to private members, I have the class declare the function as a friend.

Does D support my style of programming?


Here's a concrete example of something I'd like to do (pseudocode):

class Foo { private int x; friend globalFun; }
class Bar { private int y; friend globalFun; }

void globalFun(ref Foo foo, ref Bar bar) { foo.x = bar.y; }

Is there anything like this in D? Export sounds like the right thing, but can that be used in the example above, assuming that Foo and Bar are in separate modules?