On Thursday, 31 March 2016 at 20:12:34 UTC, Anon wrote:
Having thought about it a bit more, I am now of the opinion
that super-long strings have no business being in template
args, so we shouldn't cater to them.
meh, if it is allowed, it is going to happen. Why make it worse
when there's so little cost in making it better?
The main case with longer strings going into template arguments
I'm aware of is for when strings will be processed, then fed to
`mixin()`.
I often don't actually modify the string at all and by putting
the string as a template argument, it enables a kind of
compile-time memoization like I talked about here a short while
ago: http://stackoverflow.com/a/36251271/1457000
The string may be exceedingly if imported from a file or
generated externally and cached:
MyType!(import("definition.txt")) foo;
enum foo = ctfeFunction();
MyType!foo test;
I've never had a huge problem with this in practice, but I've
never had a huge problem with big names in practice at all
either. I can imagine both though.
(what bothers me more than the mangle actually is the compiler
error messages showing all those strings. Gross. I'd like to see
XML error messages to make displaying them easier. But that's a
separate topic.)
The original mangling discussion started from the need to
either fix a mangling problem or officially discourage
Voldemort types.
Yes, indeed, that's probably the bigger problem.
* Retains current ability to access D symbols from C (in
contrast to ideas that would use characters like '$' or '?')
$ is actually a valid identifier character in C (and quite a few
other languages). You can use it in the linker as well as in C
source code.
