Ary Borenszweig wrote:
Michel Fortin escribió:
On 2009-03-06 14:35:59 -0500, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> said:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
"Can't live without bitfields! Give me bitfields and I'll lift the
Earth!"
"Here they are, std.bitmanip. Well-defined and more portable and
flexible than C's."
"Meh, don't like the definition syntax."
Classic.
Well, he certainly has a point. Compare this:
mixin(bitfields!(
uint, "x", 2,
int, "y", 3,
uint, "z", 2,
bool, "flag", 1));
With this:
uint x : 2;
int y : 3;
uint z : 2;
bool flag : 1;
The second is certainly prettier and more readable.
Does it matter much? Not to me; I rarely use bit fields. If I were
using them a lot, perhaps I'd be more concerned.
While I don't care very much about bitfields, that "mixin(tmpl!(...))"
syntax is awful. "mixin tmpl!(...)" is better, but has too many
limitations, and it isn't always clear for the user which one should
be used. Couldn't D2 get a better syntax for mixins?
Well, now the \ is character if free:
\bitfields(
unit, "x", 2,
int, "y", 3,
uint, "z", 2,
bool, "flag", 1,
);
But I think it looks ugly: the \ is "lambda" in some languages and this
also reminds me of LaTeX... :-P
String mixins are awful in the first place. The only thing that could
save this kind of thing are AST macros.
