On 03/24/2010 07:34 PM, bearophile wrote:
Andrei:
Nick Sabalausky:
He was modifying the common expression "Those who don't learn from the past
are doomed to repeat it."
But paraphrasing ain't "as they say" because they don't say that.
Besides, I thought he's paraphrasing "Any sufficiently complicated C or
Fortran program contains a buggy implementation of Common Lisp." But I
guess that's just me being cranky - I'm sick.
Nick was right.
Sorry for upsetting you, I am sorry.
I missed this. There's no need for anything close to that. We all could
get "upset" regarding a post or a notion, not against the person airing it.
As far as the matter at hand of that thread is concerned, you mentioned
the possibility:
alias Flags!(ubyte, "do_nothing",
"walk_dog"
"cook_breakfast"
"deliver_newspaper"
"visit_miss_kerbopple"
"wash_covers") Todo;
I encourage you to code that up and see how it swims. We need to stop
inventing syntax for any single thing that seems useful, and start
eating our dogfood. If our mechanism for code generation is not good
enough, we should improve it, not generate by hand ever new constructs.
That reminds me of my late night conversation with Walter of yesterday.
I'm sure he wouldn't mind me posting it. Summarized, it's as follows:
A: I'm revising the copyedited manuscript for TDPL. This is the last
chance to remove octal literals!!!
W: I know everybody hates them, but I like them.
A: Use octal!"177"
W: Ugh.
A (esprit d'escalier): If you don't like the universal notation you
invented, who will?
Since there's always something useful coming up, we need to figure out
how our code generation abilities step up to the plate. I will add octal
to Phobos, and if it is problematic then probably we need to adjust
template syntax. My opinion in the matter is that there may be at most a
handful of octal constants total in anyone's codebase, so having a
cleverer syntax for them ain't going to make any difference.
Andrei
