On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 09:30:19PM -0400, Arkadiy Vertleyb wrote:
"Iain K. Hanson" <ikh@hansons.demon.co.uk> wrote
If Perl is better then C++ preprocessor, then it should become C++ preprocessor. But it needs to be built-in, otherwise these are apples against oranges.
With all due respect this misses the point completely. We don't need a better text substitution tool for C++. We need something that includes headers, also pragmas, and conditional compilation, the rest IMHO is macro hackery and extra lingustic.
And template metaprogramming is just template hackery, correct?
No! No! No! now we have type saftey, namespaces, overload sets, dynamic & static polymorphism, metafunctions, and metafunction classes rtc.etc.etc.
I am just trying to understand whether your antipathy is limited to macros, or spreads to everything that was not in the original design, and discovered later?
It's limited to macros. The elegance and in some senses simplicity of static meta programming has a beauty similar to a mathematical proof. The power of C++ is that its original author did not envison all that others might do, but allowed permissively that which need not be denied. /ikh