Choosing arity of a template function

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 23:11:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Urgh, forgot the "static" in front of the second "if". It does 
> work now. Nevertheless, I'm still on lookout for a more elegant 
> solution! I have this mindset that using __traits(compiles) is 
> some sort of cheating.

There's nothing cheating about using __traits(compiles). It's 
basically the same as using is(typeof(foo)) and 
is(typeof({statement;})), albeit arguably a bit more explicit 
about the fact that it's testing what compiles. And there are 
plenty of cases where one of those is exactly what code should be 
doing.

Now, if it's a test that needs to be done frequently, then it 
makes sense to create a wrapper for it that makes using it 
cleaner, so I think that you're right in the sense that we should 
be looking to have reusable traits to test with rather than using 
__traits(compiles) or is(typeof(blah)) heavily, but they're still 
fine to use when the occasion calls for it - especially if the 
test in question isn't something that's going to need to be done 
in much code. So, to a great extent, the question is whether what 
you're trying to do here is something that very many folks are 
going to want to do, and if it is, then we should find a way to 
do it without __traits(compiles), but if not, then I'm not sure 
that I'd worry much about it.

- Jonathan M Davis