Walter Bright wrote:
Yigal Chripun wrote:
But that doesn't mean the idea itself isn't valid. Perhaps a different
language with different goals in mind can provide a much simpler non
convoluted implementation and semantics for the same idea?
You've shown in the past that you're willing to break backward
compatibility in the name of progress and experiment with new ideas.
You can make decisions that the C++ committee will never approve.
Doesn't that mean that this is at least worth a shot?
I believe that D's template constraint feature fills the bill, it does
everything Concepts purported to do, and more, in a simple and easily
explained manner, except check the template body against the constraint.
The latter is, in my not-so-humble opinion, a desirable feature but its
desirability is overwhelmed by the payment in complexity and
constrictions on the Concepts necessary to make it work.
I think a consequence of that, is that facilities for compile-time
testing become quite important, since we're relying on testing rather
than compile-time checks to eliminate bugs.
So I'm delighted that the static assert backtrace patch has been
implemented.
(One very useful feature would be code-coverage of template
instantiations -- which lines of a template have actually been
instantiated?)
