Template instantiation syntax

[KennyTM~]

Walter Bright wrote:
> We seem to have reached a dead end on finding a significantly better 
> alternative than foo!(bar).
> 
> All is not lost, though. Andrei is working on an emacs module that will 
> parse D code and replace foo!(bar) with foo«bar» for display only when 
> the editor is in D mode, the underlying text will still be foo!(bar). 
> (This doesn't affect D at all, only its display in Emacs.)
> 

But will be compiler accept T«x» if I directly feed it into the 
compiler? It's no good if what you see cannot be what you type.

(« and » can be supported with a simple replacement rule “« ↦ !(” and “» 
↦ )” if they appear outside a string.)

> Also, we're going to try using ! for single argument syntax, as in:
> 
> foo!bar  is same as   foo!(bar)
> foo!10   is same as   foo!(10)
> 
> etc. 0 arguments or more than 1 argument or arguments that are more than 
> one token long will still require !( ). We'll see how that works. I 
> think it looks rather nice.

Nice.