On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 19:06:47 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 18:57:06 UTC, mist wrote:
This is a single template operator in D so it kind of solves
the problem. First is tricky, but is exactly the reason
sometimes types from external libs are used only via
alias/typedef. I'd prefer something like
:%s/boost::unord/std::unord/g though :) But well, if you are
working with C++, then templates and mixins will hardly solve
most problems of course, because C++ templates sucks and
mixins do not even exist there.
Yeah I'm working in C++, not D.
But even if I was using D, there's no way in heck that I would
use a _MIXIN_ for that:
mixin("I'm not sure how this is supposed too be
readable").unordered_map!(int) a;
makes no sense to me at all, when I could just as well have
said 'boost'.
Also, the search/replace thing won't work so well for any
real-world example (the second one is a lot closer to what I
had in mind... you can't just replace "T" with "T, U" and
expect it to work).
So my point is: no, it's not a simple matter of abstracting
things away. Lined-up text really DOES make certain tasks
easier than they would be otherwise.
Mixins and templates are tools to avoid copy-paste, there is no
point to using them just for the sake of that. I have already
mentioned that first example is not related to copy-paste and
thus not fixable with that, it is more related to alias. Second
is fixed perfectly in D using string mixins and single template
unary operator with much more readable code.
My point is - when you have a lot repetitive text pieces in your
code, it is much better in longer scope to use advanced language
tools instead of advanced editing tools. And this is one place
where D is so superior do C++. I must admit I'd prefer to have
template mixins allowed for statements to minimize string mixin
usage but it is still much much better than copy-paste in my
opinion.
