CTFE history

[bearophile]

Don:

> There was absolutely no influence from constexpr.

I suspected this.


> the key idea of Mars was dynamic
> arrays and array slices. In the oldest file in the DMD source code, they
> are called "Jupiter arrays".

Wonderful. I presume no other language in Reddit threads sports that language feature. They sound even better than Judy arrays... ;-)


> Essentially, we followed the implications of the existing language, and
> ended up with CTFE.

I see, thank you for the info. So you have given an important starting help to the creation of the CTFE idea.
There is enough material to write a not too much boring article about this five years long story.


> But tt would not be very difficult to implement a check for that.

Very good, then it may be added later, if necessary.


> Still, CTFE functions are always going to fail when they divide by zero, exceed array bounds, etc.

Compile-time exceptions may be possible. They may help a little on this.

Bye and thank you,
bearophile