shouting versus dotting

[Benji Smith]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> One morning I woke up with the sudden realization of what the problem 
> was: the shouting.

Here's my (nutty) opinion:

Neither the "!" nor the "." really want to be there. I think the 
language really *wants* to be using a bare set of parens for templates. 
Because the language actually wants templates and functions to converge.

Instead of a special-case syntax for templates, and a set of special 
rules for CTFE, and a whole set of parallel "static" statements (if, 
else, foreach) and a special compile-type-only type construct (tuples), 
just let D be D, either at runtime or compile type.

If a function could return a Type, and if that type could be used in a 
Type Constructor, then you'd have all the magic template sauce you'd 
need, and templates could happily converge themselves with regular 
functions.

Hey! I told you it was going to be nutty!!!

<g>

--benji