On 2009-04-21 13:14:07 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
There's been quite some discussion lately about dynamically-typed
languages et al. Here's a pretty good and easy-to-follow presentation
by Peter Norvig (AI guru among other gurusdoms he owns) on how
dynamically-typed languages make implementation of various design
patterns considerably easier:
http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
I love that sentence: "Long ago, a subroutine call was just a pattern"
followed by some assembler code equivalent to a function call.
Somewhere in there it says that in a dynamic language types and classes
are objects available at runtime, which means you can put types into
variables. That's very true in Objective-C (where classes are
themselves objects).
We're almost there in D: ClassInfo represents a class, TypeInfo a type,
but what we can do with them currently is of limited utility. They're
also distinct entities from the compile-time type concept. Allowing
automatic unboxing of compile-time types to TypeInfo/ClassInfo, and
adding runtime-reflection equivalent to what is available through
compile-time reflection) would help drastically at using D as a dynamic
language.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
