D and the world

[Don Clugston]

eao197 wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:28:56 +0400, David B. Held 
> <dheld at codelogicconsulting.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think what even FP langs have not explored to a compelling level of 
>> detail is metaprogramming.  I get the impression that most FP 
>> programmers feel that higher-order functions are good enough, and even 
>> Lisp "just has macros".  But I think D will show that while macros are 
>> powerful, they are not a replacement for templates and do not cover 
>> the full space of metaprogramming.  Yes, it is possible to do 
>> non-macro metaprogramming in Lisp, but being a dynamically checked 
>> language, this isn't nearly as interesting as it is in D.
> 
> I'm afraid that D will lose the competition to Nemerle in such area. 

Don't bet on it. It's not clear to me that there will be much of use 
that Nemerle can do, which D will not be able to, once it has macros.
The question is, how well does metaprogramming scale in each of these 
languages?

Pages like this one:
http://nemerle.org/Defining_types_from_inside_macros
gives me grave doubts about Nemerle. Reading all those macro pages, the 
whole thing seems like a hack, that exposes many low-level details of 
the compiler. But obviously, the language may improve with time.

> Because Nemerle is FP language and is based on metaprogramming. Nemerle 
> has very small FP-core of language and everything else is implemented 
> via macros (even if- and for-statements are macros in Nemerle). Unlike 
> Lisp Nemerle is a statically typed languages, it has generics too. And 
> Nemerle is .Net language, so it already has a big amount of avialable 
> libraries.
> 
> --Regards,
> Yauheni Akhotnikau