On Friday, 6 April 2018 at 21:23:00 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
D does not have any kind of AST macros and likely never will. Walter is completely against the idea - though I'd have to go digging through newsgroup's history to find posts where he talked about it to give the exact reasons. It's been a while since they were discussed last, and I don't recall them at the moment.
I think Walter's reason was that such macros would hide too many idiosyncrasies in how they were programmed, such that a lot of code which seems simple on the surface will actually obfuscate complicated and arbitrary macro-programming patterns. Thus, code that uses them will become much less maintainable, because it is liable to do so many different and hidden things. Also, the tasks for which AST-macros would typically be used are already largely accommodated by templates and other features. Thus, the real need for them isn't that high.
