Wes:
Can you do this in D? If not then what other language?
Maybe CommonLisp and Scheme (and maybe Clojure) are able to do
what you ask for (but normally they don't have the
stringification with $).
1. Can you get a list of all classes and variables in the
current scope e.g. __traits()?
I think it's a missing feature. But what are the use cases? In
Python it's easy to do, but it's not a common need.
2. Can you statically iterate over every field of a class?
It seems like the only returns are string lists from __traits().
I basically am interested in being able to generate a
PrettyPrint/Serializable/Hash template without passing in every
single field.
With their names and mixin() then maybe you able to do what you
look for.
3. Is there any way of executing code or programs during compile
time?
Only CTFE.
I've seen an example of CTFE (Compile Time Function Evaluation),
although I'm unsure if this works for stuff like classes.
CTFE now works with classes too.
However, I am considering more advanced execution (not
constants)
such as printing to a file during compiling for stuff like how
long compiling a certain function/template takes.
With the proposed __ctWrtiteln you are able to print things at
compile time to standard output. But there is no enough
introspection to know how much time it takes to compile part of a
program.
5. Why not support other operators like $, #, and @?
This is more of a rhetorical... as I know the language doesn't
need them, nor would I know if they would be binary/unary
prefix/etc or the precedence... although they would be nice to
have. Specifically I'd like $prefix to be stringification.
The operator overloading syntax is string-based, so adding new
operators is not too much hard. But I don't know what are the
advantages and disadvantages. The $ operator is used (in a
certain context) to denote the length of collections.
Bye,
bearophile
