Interpolated strings

[Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d]

On 2017-04-19 02:30, Walter Bright wrote:

> I'm not saying you cannot do cool and useful things with AST macros. My
> position is it encourages absolutely awful code as (usually
> inexperienced) programmers compete to show how clever their macros are.
>
> The language gets balkanized into a collection of dialects that are
> unrecognizable across user groups.
>
> As a compiler dev who gets stuck figuring out users' bug reports,
> dealing with templates is bad enough (the first thing I do with a bug
> report is redo it to remove all the templates). I do not want to deal
> with some custom syntax. If I may pull the "I'm older" card, programmers
> will find as they gain experience that the AST macros are just not worth
> it.
>
> This disastrous state of affairs has occurred with every language that
> supports macros.
>
> If you want a nauseous example, check out the Boost C preprocessor
> metaprogramming library. Or C++ expression templates - so cool, and yet
> so utterly wretched.
>
> Reminds me of a story from the 1980s. Microsoft's MASM stood for "Macro
> Assembler". Inevitably, Microsoft programmers invented a pile of macros
> that sort of turned asm programming into a pseudo-high-level language.
> This was shipped with every copy of MASM.
>
> A friend of mine who worked at MS was once given the task of fixing a
> bug in 50K of MASM code written in this macro language. The author of it
> had long since moved on. Every coder assigned to this task failed. My
> friend got it fixed in a couple hours. He was asked by his astonished
> manager how he'd managed to do it:
>
> "I assembled the code into an object file. Then I disassembled it with
> Zortech's OBJ2ASM, figured out how to fix it, then submitted the
> disassembled code as the new source code."

I have a suspension that it's the name "macro" that is the problem here. 
It leaves a bad taste due to issues with macros in the past.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg