On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 08:07:52 UTC, Alex wrote:
On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 07:49:39 UTC, Simen Kjærås wrote:
That's not the definition of lowering used elsewhere, and so
will lead to confusion and misunderstanding. I would strongly
suggest you rethink your definition of lowering.
There is no official definition. That's because some natural
rewrite rules are implied, which are very general, I assume...
How official do you want it to be? That's the only definition in
common use by others in the context of compilers.
My point, is that if it is impossible to catch all cases of
template rewriting (which I'm advocating from the beginning)
getOverloads should not be extended to templates, as this would
be a fundamental change in the language.
There is no template rewriting taking place in the language today
- that seems to be a feature you are arguing for. getOverloads
should return the overloads of a template as they are defined in
the language today. Template overloads are mentioned in the D
spec[0], and are clearly a real thing that it's useful to be able
to manipulate.
You seem to be arguing against a feature on the basis that if the
language were significantly different from what it is, the
feature would be confusing. The language isn't that way, so the
feature isn't confusing in that way.
Having getOverloads return template overloads solves a real issue
right now, and would be useful even if your suggested change were
implemented (though the behavior would be slightly different). If
your suggested feature is impossible to implement, are you
suggesting we simply throw our hands in the air and give up,
instead of implementing a useful feature?
--
Simen
[0]: https://dlang.org/concepts.html
