Template Declarations - Why not Template definitions?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, July 01, 2015 09:29:56 via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tuesday, 30 June 2015 at 21:06:58 UTC, WhatMeWorry wrote:
> > Bonus question: Isn't a Zero-parameter template declaration
> > pretty much worthless?
>
> Functions in templates get certain attributes inferred
> automatically, like `@nogc`, `pure`, `nothrow`, `@safe`. Some
> people use them for that purpose. (Because of IFTI, functions
> with empty template parameters can be called with the same syntax
> as normal functions, they don't need the `!()`.)

That and it lets you use auto ref. It also can be necessary when overloading
templated functions. It used to be that you couldn't overlooad a templated
function with a non-templated function, forcing you to have functions with
no template parameters if you wanted to have what would normally be a
non-templated function overload a templated function. That's now been fixed,
but the overload rules aren't quite the same between a non-templated
functions and a templated function with no parameters, so sometimes you
still need to templatize a function with empty parameters depending on what
you're trying to do with your function overloads.

- Jonathan M Davis