On 10/17/2021 4:04 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Maybe you should have read more SIGPLAN papers then, there are several examples of those capabilities.

It seems strange that for something so widely known, it never came up in any enhancement requests for major languages like C, C++, Pascal, etc.

Instead, when people discovered that C++ templates formed a turing-complete programming language to do computations at compile time, and would write about what a great new capability that was!

(I also recall a C++ Committee person pooh-pooing D's CTFE, and showing how it could be done with C++ templates, at least until the compiler ran out of memory, which it did for non-trivial computations. It could do string manipulation, as long as the string wasn't longer than 8 characters.)

On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 02:28:11 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> at least until the compiler ran out of memory

Don't throw stones from glass houses!

On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 02:42:22AM +0000, Adam D Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 02:28:11 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > at least until the compiler ran out of memory
> 
> Don't throw stones from glass houses!

Yeah... at one point I really wanted to show my coworkers what D was capable of, but my initial private test caused dmd to run out of memory and crash on a low-memory box (which a requirement for our project).  I quickly decided *not* to show my coworkers what dmd could do (or could not do!), in order not to give them a really bad initial impression of D.

DMD's all-speed-or-nothing design makes it a memory-hungry beast. It works wonderfully on modern PCs overflowing with spare RAM; in low-memory environments, this leads to all sorts of problems, from thrashing on I/O (due to swapping) to outright crashing before it could finish compilation.  I'd rather have a slow compiler than a super-fast one that crashes before it could finish doing what is its raison d'etre.


T

-- 
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, yeah."