From: hanzspam@... (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hannu_Kankaanp=E4=E4?=)
Date: 2003-08-23T01:58:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Rite/Ruby2.0 & Ruby vs OCaml

mgarriss <mgarriss@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<3F3F1FE5.1030600@earthlink.net>...
> I love Ruby, but in defence of C++ I have to say the there is nothing 
> quite like the C++ template feature. Metaprogramming is really 
> interesting.  Doing factorial at no run-time cost (all at compile time), 
> compile time parser generators, and such. 

But metaprogramming in C++ is a side-effect of the template
system that was originally designed for something else. That's
why metaprogramming in C++ is awkward, hard and damn slow
for the compiler. So I wonder why you're so attracted to it. You
should see Lisp's macro system -- Metaprogramming done
correctly. If you're interested, download Paul Graham's On Lisp
for free:
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

In Lisp metaprogramming, everything that is available at
run-time is also available at compile-time. So you could
do a macro that reads some file, generates code from it and
does some optimizations with parameters known at compile-time.
Meanwhile the C++ template lovers praise snippets that can
calculate something trivial like factorials or logarithms
in base 2 ;).