"Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)" wrote
Arkadiy Vertleyb wrote:
Is it "cumbersome"? I don't know -- is template metaprogramming "cumbersome"? I really believe they are very much alike. Both were not in the initial design, both were later discovered, and both are now "glorified" by some people, and hated by the others.
First, the degree of cumbersomeness depends on what those tools are used for. But that's a tautology.
Second, I disagree that the template engine and the preprocessor are similar. I see very very little similarity. The former is a mean pure functional language fostering pattern matching, recursion, and sporting knowledge and high integration with the non-templated part of C++. The computational model is known and powerful. In contrast, programming based on the token-oriented preprocessor uses arcane idioms and computations, which IMO just takes us back 40 years. I don't find the two similar at all, except probably that they both are being used for things they weren't intended for :o).
I didn't talk about _similarity_ -- I talked about _analogy_, sorry if it wasn't clear. I am not so strong in theory, and I don't know why token-oriented ideoms are so bad, especially since they are used together with other techniques rather than instead of them. All I see is that PP allows me to solve some issues that I can't solve otherwise. Please give me one good reason why I should not use it. Regards, Arkadiy