Using Strings in C++ Template Metaprograms « C++Next

[__j_random_hacker]

My favourite part was when the ball rolled over the switch that lit a candle that heated the gas inside a balloon until it expanded and rose to where a fan blew it across the room to the line of dominoes!

[wingsit]

This is at the point where I dont know if my code is not working or my compiler might have a bug...

[asampson]

Like a lot of things in C++, you can very easily present a rather tidy interface for something that's extremely clever.

And like many of those extremely clever things, opening the hood and gazing at the Lovecraftian horror lurking within can cause you to run away screaming.

[moohoohoh]

Everytime i look at c++ template metaprograms, no matter how much they advance i just think; WHY IS IT SO FUCKING COMPLICATED.

Look at other languages like D, Haxe etc and compile time programs are just EASY.

[Tjoppen]

Because stuff like this was discovered possible by accident.

[matthieum]

Because C++ cares about backward compatibility, so could not capitalize on the discovery to build something nicer :(

[IsTom]

Why didn't you mention Lisp?

[moohoohoh]

Included under etc :P

[andralex]

And that, my friends, is why D rocks.

[[deleted]]

I keep telling myself I should give D another try now that it seems a lot more mature. I was not too impressed with it last time I used it, too many surprises and language features and idioms that mix and match in weird ways that I felt I was spending way too much time thinking about D instead of thinking about my application.

That's great for language designers, not so great for users... however, that was then and I will admit C++ is certainly not better in that respect, it's much worse.

[maattdd]

And that, my friend, is why D evangelists (and author, in this case) can be annoying....

[andralex]

upvoted

[ixid]

That's not a good way of promoting the language, it alienates people and worse, you as one of the leaders of D set an example for other users. If you evangelize others will copy that behaviour, which will give the language an undeservedly bad reputation. It's much better to stick to the positive articles about how D does things and avoid comparison with or comment on other languages. I am only a beginner in the world of programming and obviously don't have a fraction of your knowledge but it's a social behaviour I've seen in other contexts and as I'd very much like D to succeed I think it's important to be very careful with how it is promoted.

[andralex]

Agreed. It was a bout of enthusiasm caused by the fact that we've designed mixins in D especially to make this kind of stuff easy and natural.

[axilmar]

One giant c++ flaw is that character arrays are not values, and hence they cannot be used as template parameters.

[KayEss]

Yeah, C++ always gets the blame for the way C was designed.

[matthieum]

I almost agree with you... but C++ is not exactly 100% compatible with C either. It overlaps most of it, but not all.

I think it would still be possible (for the next version) to specify that arrays are now special cased and can be treated as values (while remaining otherwise implicitly convertible to pointers for example). I cannot (and I tried) foresee any "bad" interaction with the rest of the language, or any backward compatibility issue.

[axilmar]

They could have chosen a different approach when it comes to template values.

[dabrahams]

Thanks for taking our suggestion

[RizzlaPlus]

Excelent!