• Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight gmail.com> Apr 28 2007
• Daniel Keep <daniel.keep.lists gmail.com> Apr 28 2007

Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight gmail.com> writes:

Walter Bright Wrote:

 I keep racking my brain trying to come up with a short, pithy example of 
 CTFE that uses AAs or struct literals. It should be just a few lines, 
 and make it clear why CTFE is a great thing. I want to use it in 
 presentations.
 
 Any ideas?


How about one that, given a function pointer/delegate and the name of a Java
package, wraps it for the JNI with the correct naming scheme and C calling
convention.

Daniel Keep <daniel.keep.lists gmail.com> writes:

Robert Fraser wrote:
 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 I keep racking my brain trying to come up with a short, pithy example of 
 CTFE that uses AAs or struct literals. It should be just a few lines, 
 and make it clear why CTFE is a great thing. I want to use it in 
 presentations.

 Any ideas?


 How about one that, given a function pointer/delegate and the name of a Java
package, wraps it for the JNI with the correct naming scheme and C calling
convention.


I don't think you could do that with CTFE.  Unless I'm missing
something, CTFE can only generate values, not code or types.

Well, not unless you involve the mixin keyword, but there doesn't seem
to be anything you can do with that that couldn't be done with templates.

I think that, at this stage, CTFE doesn't really *have* one awesome
example you can point to and say "is it not nifty?"  The "problem" is
that CTFE seems to be a nicer way of generating source code strings and
other values at compile time.

Maybe you could show CTFE being used for pre-computing a table of sine
and cosine values, or show it being used to generate a source string as
compared to an equivalent template version.

That, or you could use that brainf*ck compiler someone wrote using CTFE.
 At least, I think it was CTFE...

	-- Daniel

-- 
int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll.
              // guaranteed to be random.
}

http://xkcd.com/

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i28a2Xs3MSr2e4/6+7t4TNSMb6HTOp5en5g6RAHCP  http://hackerkey.com/