Compile-time reflection

[Kirk McDonald]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Kirk McDonald wrote:
> 
>>>
>>> I'm not sure about some of the detail, but in a general wey, yes it 
>>> would be welcome to have such changes that would allows us to better 
>>> work with functions. Some of the issues here are not just about 
>>> compile time reflection, for instance, that you have to create a 
>>> temporary type, or do a cast, to get a function pointer of a 
>>> particular overload, seems quite hackish to me.
>>>
>>
>> This would not change that. In fact, I honestly see nothing wrong with 
>> that. Casting seems like simplest way of specifying the overload, 
>> without introducing new syntax. (Although I'm aware some folks want to 
>> introduce new syntax for this express purpose.)
>>
> 
> Casting is a kludge, and should not be used for something that is 
> perfectly normal, valid (and possibly common). Fortunately we can hide 
> it with some cleaner templates:
>   auto fn2 = overload!(fn, int, char) // select fn(int, char) overload
> I don't think new syntax should be added. But that doesn't mean that 
> some things could not be improved with the current design. For instance, 
> taking the address of an overloaded function without a cast (or another 
> overload selection mechanism) should result in a error, instead of 
> simply returning the address of the lexically first overload.
> 

I agree with making that an error, so long as we get a way to 
automatically derive the types of all of the overloads.

-- 
Kirk McDonald
http://kirkmcdonald.blogspot.com
Pyd: Connecting D and Python
http://pyd.dsource.org