On Saturday, 26 May 2012 at 11:49:47 UTC, Chad J wrote:
On 05/24/2012 07:21 PM, Araq wrote:
On Thursday, 24 May 2012 at 22:56:52 UTC, Kevin Cox wrote:
On May 24, 2012 6:53 PM, "Froglegs" <lug...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Nimrod is full of constructs that have inlining semantics and
as such
declaration order matters quite a bit. The D compiler has/had
bugs with
this feature for a reason. ;-)
OK, now I'm curious. Why?
Because it's hard to implement? ;-)
t() # the compiler needs to *expand* t here; parsing t's
# header and put it into the symbol table is not enough
template t() = ...
And Nimrod supports symbol table inspection:
when not defined(p):
proc p = echo "a"
else:
proc p = echo "b"
p() # what should that do?
These things can be solved, but it's lots of work and I have no
idea how the result would affect compile times (probably
negligible).
I'm considering to weaken the requirement but I don't mind
this feature:
Having the order reflect the call graph has its advantages
too. Many
consider the resulting order *backwards*, but at least there
is *an* order.
Wouldn't it be good enough to define the order arbitrarily when
building your symbol table? What kind of information is this
allowing the programmer to convey to the compiler?
I was talking about readability here. You can read an ordinary
(smallish) Nimrod program from *bottom to top*. (And a forward
declaration often screams "warning: mutually recursive procs
ahead").
Granted, from *top to bottom* would be nicer, but I have never
seen that happen in practice in C# (which allows for arbitrary
order); but admittedly that's a very weak point.
I'm already skeptical because I have no intuition for how this
allows me to better optimize my code ;)
Btw, I've looked at Nimrod a while ago (year+) and found it
very elegant. I love good metaprogramming. I think my only
complaints were the bus-factor and the apparent lack of array
slices (the kind that doesn't cause copying). Still, very
promising.
See my other answer about the slicing. The bus factor got better
as there are now 3 core developers. :-)
