On Sunday, 19 July 2020 at 20:46:19 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On 7/19/20 4:21 PM, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
Perhaps what's needed is something more that is less than
allowing aliases for expressions in the wide sense you suggest
here.
I agree. Something not yet mentioned is that aliases provide
direct access to the symbols for the purposes of looking at
attributes -- something that a wrapper function doesn't provide.
The question is: how do you restrict it to explicit data items
within a specific aggregate without parsing arbitrary
expressions?
Well perhaps you do parse a "constant-offset expression" i.e.
syntactically dotted with constant indexes, like
name1.name2[constant].name3 and then later there's a semantic
check that the "constant-offset expression" involves no
indirections when an offset into the top level object is
computed. Then it's treated like any other attribute of a struct
with a known offset.
