On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 19:26:04 UTC, Peter Alexander
wrote:
Here's a super quick summary for those without time to watch:
He proposed a language keyword, 'prorogue' used like so:
int foo = prorogue bar(x);
The keyword indicates that, instead of calling 'bar', the code
should ask the user for the return value, which is then
memoized with the value of x, and is saved across executions.
bar need not be defined. You can also do things like 'return
prorogue;' to request a value to return.
The reported uses of this are:
- Top-down development: prorogue functions to mock them.
- Debugging: mark a call as prorogue to provide a value to
repro a failure case.
- Crowdsourcing: if you memoize across the internet then all
users collaborate to fill in gaps.
That's actually kindof neat. I'm not convinced by the
Crowd-sourcing aspect, but it seems like it would be a nice
abstraction for sketching out an architecture or debugging a
rare, hard to access code path.
On the surface at least, this looks trivial to implement in D.
