D parsing

[Chad Joan]

On Wednesday, 6 November 2013 at 09:09:32 UTC, Chris Cain wrote:
> On Wednesday, 6 November 2013 at 08:34:32 UTC, Chad Joan wrote:
>> Also, IIRC, it is believed that string mixins with CTFE are 
>> potentially more powerful.
>
> Maybe. But first, the point that Brian Schott brought up has to 
> be addressed (language spec and DMD must be in sync). Second, 
> CTFE has to get more efficient. It's _very_ easy to make it run 
> out of memory and it's fairly slow at executing. But yeah, I 
> agree that there could be a library AST manipulator and it'd be 
> pretty nice. But it'll require that two sets of parsers in two 
> different languages be kept in sync, which is likely to be a 
> challenge.
>
> There's pros and cons to both of the approaches, really.

Right.

My thoughts are, "be patient".  The slow CTFE can be fixed 
without changes to the language spec, and it has progressed 
really well over the last couple years.  The DMD vs spec thing is 
also fixable by building tools that operate on a formal grammar 
and forcing the grammar to be thoroughly explored.  At the end of 
the day, I believe these will both be pleasantly fixed, and the 
spec won't end up with a bunch of complexity that was "useful 10 
years ago".  It all makes sense to me, at least.