Fully dynamic d by opDotExp overloading

[Don]

bearophile wrote:
> SandeepK:
>> I too am having difficulty in understanding the benefit of this particular proposal.
> 
> Read the thread, some of the answers give several use cases.
> 
> 
>> If I understand it right, the string essentially is still static and hence known at compile time?<
> 
> It can be unknown at compile-time.

How on earth could that happen? It's always known at compile time.

> 
> 
>> Anyways, I have wanted similar functionality for a different purpose. In graphics is common to do swizzle on vector. A float4 vector has xyzw components and some specialized languages like shaders allow you to do shuffle and replicate the components.
>> float4 vec = float4(1.0f,2.0f,3.0f,4.0f);
>> vec = vec.wzyx; 
> 
> Note that using dynamic access may be a bit slow for that.

I don't see _anything_ dynamic in this proposal, actually.

> 
> On the other hand you can do that in D1 creating a small compile-time function that computes the cartesian product to create the strings of the names of those function methods (to be used as attributes), that you can add with a mixin (and a static foreach, if necessary).
> I have shown such code here time ago, don't ask me to write it again :-) This is a starting point:

Yes, but the syntax isn't quite as nice as with this proposal.