Objective-D, reflective programming, dynamic typing

[Christopher Wright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>>> You can't.  D's varargs suck.
>>> Of course you can. Where did that come from?
>>>
>>> void foo(T...)(T args) { bar(args); }
>>> void bar(T...)(T args) {  foreach (a; args) writeln(a); }
>>
>> *NOT* the same thing.  They are templated, which means a new
>> instantiation for each different combination of argument types, and
>> cannot be virtual.  Please keep that in mind.
> 
> But my point was that variadic templates can be ideal wrappers for the 
> non-templated variadics, which can be virtual. It's the best of both 
> worlds, you get no bloating and comfortable calling syntax too.
> 
> I think it's silly to ask "I want to do... xyz... but without templates 
> because templates aren't virtual/cause bloating/bring up painful 
> memories". Templates are an excellent starting point in many designs 
> because they preserve full typing of the parameters. Then, of course you 
> can route them to dynamic functions no problem.

Okay, so before I had to write:

void foo(...)
{
    foo(_argptr, _arguments);
}
void foo(void* argptr, TypeInfo[] argtypes) {}


You want me to instead write:

// needs a different name due to overload issues
void foo_templated(T...)(T args)
{
    foo(args);
}
void foo(...)
{
    foo(_argptr, _arguments);
}
void foo(void* argptr, TypeInfo[] argtypes) {}

How the hell does that help?