Instead, what if the literal syntax was amended to take an optional type
name, like this:
// Defaults to using built-in associative array type
auto assocArray = [
"hello" : "world
];
// Uses my own custom type.
auto hashtable = MyHashTableType!(string, string) [
"hello" : "world
];
You could accomplish that pretty easily, as long as the custom type had
a no-arg constructor and a function with the signature:
void add(K key, V val)
What about this: an associative array literal would have the type (Key,
Value)[] (an array of a Key-Value tuple), and you'd use opAssign (or the
new implicit casting operators from D2.0, opImplicitCastFrom or what it
was) to convert it to your hash table type.
MyHashTableType hashtable = ["hello" : "word"];
expends to
(char[], char[])[] tmp = [("hello", "word")];
MyHashTableType hashtable = tmp;
expands to
(char[], char[])[] tmp = [("hello", "word")];
MyHashTableType!(char[], char[]) hashtable; //magical type inference
hashtable.opAssign([("hello", "word")]);
Anyway, looking forward to the day the D compiler is merely a CTFE
interpreter, and the actual code generation is implemented as D library
and executed as normal user code during compile time.
