Standalone AA implementation ready for review (Was: Re: Replacing AA's in druntime)

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/15/12 12:12 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:05:46 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> On 3/15/12 11:02 AM, Don Clugston wrote:
>>> This is good, and very, very important. Do *not* make any attempt at
>>> compiler integration until it is *completely* ready.
>>>
>>> This includes AA literals. They need to be accepted somehow. The
>>> compiler will give you syntax sugar and *nothing* more.
>>> One possibility might be to accept a pair of array literals,
>>> representing keys and values.
>>> Possibly it should call a CTFE function to convert them into some other
>>> form?
>>
>> Offhand, I think this rewrite should be sufficient:
>>
>> [e11:e12, e21:e22]
>>
>> --->
>>
>> .object.associativeArrayLiteral(e11, e12, e21, e22)
>>
>> Then type manipulation and template constraints can take care of the
>> rest. Am I missing something?
>
> Wouldn't this require a new template instantiation for each sized AA per
> key/value type? Or were you planning to use varargs?

Template function takes over, does whatever is necessary, such as 
possibly conversion to varargs.

> So long as the data that is actually passed to the AA is on the stack
> (and simply a slice is passed), I like Don's idea better.

What would that look like?



Andrei