On Friday, 1 June 2012 at 15:38:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, June 01, 2012 17:57:51 d coder wrote:
Greetings
I know there is a plan for D to have AST macros eventually. I
wanted to
know if it is a feature being worked upon at this point of
time.
Approximately how long it would be before AST Macros see the
light of the
day in D?
I know D is an opensource project and I am not trying to put
any pressure
here. I am just curious because I think D is a great language
for creating
DSL's and having AST Macros will make a big difference.
There was talk of doing AST macros quite while back, but it was
decided not to
add them to D2. They may or may not ever be revisited. This
page isn't
necessarily completely up-to-date (
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel ), but it
specifically lists 2
things as deferred to D3.0:
* AST macros.
* Bartosz Milewski's race-free type system.
String mixins should be powerful enough in most, if not all,
cases. It's been
shown that it's quite possible to create DSLs as strings with
whatever syntax
you want and have them compiled to D code (Philippe Segaud put
together a
really cool library for generating PEGs:
https://github.com/PhilippeSigaud/Pegged/wiki ).
We _may_ see AST macros added to the language in the distant
future, but it's
not happening anytime soon.
- Jonathan M Davis
If you're interested in AST macros take a look at Nimrod
(http://nimrod-code.org) its got AST macros.
