On 18/12/2009 02:49, Tim Matthews wrote:
In a reddit reply: "The concept of templates in D is exactly the same as
in C++. There are minor technical differences, syntactic differences,
but it is essentially the same thing. I think that's understandable
since Digital Mars had a C++ compiler."

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/af511/ada_programming_generics/c0hcb04?context=3


I have never touched ada but I doubt it is really has that much that
can't be done in D. I thought most (if not all) the problems with C++
were absent in D as this summary of the most common ones points out
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/templates-revisited.html.

Your thoughts?

I don't know Ada but I do agree with that reddit reply about c++ and D templates. D provides a better implementation of the exact same design, so it does fix many minor issues (implementation bugs). An example of this is the foo<bar<Class>> construct that doesn't work because of the ">>" operator. However, using the same design obviously doesn't solve any of the deeper design problems and this design has many of those. An example of that is that templates are compiled as part of the client code. This forces a library writer to provide the source code (which might not be acceptable in commercial circumstances) but even more frustrating is the fact that template compilation bugs will also happen at the client.

There's a whole range of designs for this and related issues and IMO the C++ design is by far the worst of them all. not to mention the fact that it isn't an orthogonal design (like many other "features" in c++). I'd much prefer a true generics design to be separated from compile-time execution of code with e.g. CTFE or AST macros, or other designs.

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