From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2003-08-19T02:14:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Rite/Ruby2.0 & Ruby vs OCaml

Paul Brannan wrote:
>
> IMO, metaprogramming is one of the worst "features" the C++ language has
> to offer.  Code that makes heavy use of template or preprocessor
> metaprogramming can be very slow to compile and can be very difficult to
> understand.  Don't get me wrong; from a tinkering standpoint,
> metaprogramming is insanely cool.  Metaprogramming in C++ has a strange
> attraction to it, but I've seen people spend days trying to use template
> metaprogramming to solve a problem that would have taken an hour to
> solve with plain ordinary C++.

In C++ I once tried to extend the STL string template for a very specific,
project-dependent purpose. After 3 days I gave up. I'm no slouch when it
comes to development, but I will say that for non-trivial templates like
STL, they are extremely difficult to grok.

Curt