[boost] Re: Formal Review: FOREACH macro

From: Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) (SeeWebsiteForEmail_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-05-08 18:10:55

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).

Andrei