The introduction of templates to C++ added a facility whereby the compiler can act as an interpreter. This makes it possible to write programs in a subset of C++ which are interpreted at compile time. Language features such as for loops and if statements can be replaced by template specialization and recursion. The first examples of these techniques were written by Erwin Unruh and circulated among members of the ANSI/ISO C++ standardization committee [1]. These programs didn’t have to be executed — they generated their output at compile time as warning messages. For example, one program generated warning messages containing prime numbers when compiled.
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 7:41 am
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