[boost] Re: Formal Review: FOREACH macro

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-05-08 20:20:19

"Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)" <SeeWebsiteForEmail_at_[hidden]> writes:

> 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. 

These all sound like moral judgements.  Are pattern matching and
recursion "good" while token-oriented computation is "bad?"

Or are you getting at something else?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com