Recursive Declarations (for functions).

[Russell Lewis]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Hi. I was designing a FSM and I wanted to use a simple scheme where a
> state is represented with a function which returns a pointer to the next
> state (function) when I realized there is no support in the language to
> declare a function that returns a function with the same signature as
> itself.
> 
> Here is an explanation of the problem and suggested solutions for C++:
> http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/057.htm
> 
> AFAIK you can implement something similar in D, but D doesn't have a
> "native" solution either.
> 
> What I want to know is if it's even posible to have a nice syntax to
> support this, something like:
> 
> fp function() fp;
> 
> Is the type system capable of handling this?

You're not the first to think that this is an intriguing concept! 
However, the type system doesn't support it with any "nice" syntax.