kris wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> Kris wrote:
>>
>>> D apparently cannot populate non-static arrays of any
>>> type, let alone variable type. Seems I was hoping for too much :-(
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure, but I'd be thoroughly amazed if that was possible, even in theory.
>>
>> Non-static in itself implies runtime, right?
> 
> Yes and no. Theoretically, the space required can be allocated upon the stack. Optionally the TypeInfo[] noted can be constructed and populated at compile time also. What's left is the population of the _arptr value array: that would be done at runtime; but inline.

Theoretically, I think this could be done at compile-time by building a char string containing the appropriate data and assigning a const void* to it.  Thus the three parameters:

char 'a'
char 'b'
int 5

would be encoded to something roughly like this (ignoring big/little endian rules and such):

"ab\0\0\u5\0\0\0"

using template code.  But doing this elegantly would likely require a set of template operations to build upon, and unless Don's been quite busy in the past week I doubt this exists yet.  For the moment, I'd mark this up as possibly good fodder for a paper on advanced D template programming and live with a simpler solution.


Sean