On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 07:45:10 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
It is like traveling back in time when parametric polymorphism
was debated in university papers and everyone was inventing
their own code generation tool.
We are in 2014, not in the early 90's. So to ignore what
happened in mainstream language design in the last 20 years, is
nothing more than an opinionated political decision against
generics.
I have a hard time to subsume D's type system under parametric
polymorphism, while I see how Javas generics may be. This may
just be way over my head, but I'd rather say D has a
sophisticated way of ad-hoc polymorphism that provides ways to
generate overloads on demand, contrary to the wikipedia statement
that ad-hoc only allows for a fixed amount of overloads.
Thus, ad hoc polymorphism can generally only support a limited
number of such distinct types, since a separate implementation
has to be provided for each type. [1]
I'd say inout is a example of parametric polymorphism in D.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_polymorphism
