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yeah, though in this case they didn't say "it can't be done" or "was never done" - just that it is a "really dumb idea". At least that's what the post claims they said.

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Which is precisely my point. As one other commenter said: "who have you been talking to?". Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general, maybe those experts were talking about a very particular problem? It's not clear.

>Executing code at compile-time is a great idea in general

Well, it did create a big mess and overhead in C++ for one (not to mention adding another turing-complete language on top of it)...

Ah but that's an implementation and design choice issue. It's like saying "classes are a bad idea because implementing them in pure C is cumbersome".

Well, to criticize something people start (and, often, end) on concrete examples they've seen it in practice. And for "compile time code generation" C++ templates are an example they'd be familiar with (perhaps the canonical one, as more people know C++ than Lisp).

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