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Comment by matt42 | Hacker News Reader

You are right. I'll make it clear in the README. The preprocessing can be easy done by hand for those who want to skip the use of the preprocessor, it is actually pretty simple:

[...]

@test

[...]

is equivalent to:

iod_define_symbol(test, _test)

[...]

s::_test

[...]

Their is 3 reason for implementation of the @ syntax:

  - Not having to pre-declare all the symbols.

  - Replacing s::_ by @

  - Suggesting a new simple but powerful feature to 
    the teams writing clang++ and g++.

And yes, silicon needs generic lambda function from C++14 . But this is less a problem since this is already in g++, clang++, and soon in the visual studio c++ compiler.

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I'm too lazy/not interested enough in this to give it a try, and am not sure at all that they are powerful enough to do what you want, but have you considered using user-defined literals? The way I understand these work,

  "test"@

could return an object that allows one to write

  "test"@("hello"!)

The constructors called could, of course, also link that object in a global store.

Could it not have been expressed with just a macro?

EDIT: Down votes? lol

Here is the tranformation done by the preprocessor: https://gist.github.com/matt-42/a53cc0b0a8d8f1cf673f

It would be really convenient to have it done by the C preprocessor, but it seems impossible to me to get it with macro only. Am I wrong?

It seems like you could do something like:

    #define IOD_SYM(name) iod_define_symbol(name, _##name);
    #define S(name) s::_##name;

Then use S(test) instead of @test and any files that need these symbols defined could just have IOD_SYM(test) at the top or something.

#define S(name) is a bit dangerous. It would affect any C/C++ function called S.

Actually using [ZLang](https://github.com/pfultz2/ZLang), you could define them like this:

    #define IOD_DEFINE_SYMBOL(name) iod_define_symbol(name, _##name)
    #define IOD_S(name) s::_##name

    #define ZLANG_iod_define (IOD_DEFINE_SYMBOL)
    #define ZLANG_iod_s (IOD_S)

And then compiling with `-DZLANG_NS=iod` you can call it like this:

    // Define symbols
    $(define hello)
    $(define message)

    auto hello_api = make_api(

        // The hello world procedure.
        $(s hello) = [] () { return D($(s message) = "Hello world."); }

    );

Also, ZLang can be supported without a need for a dependency on ZLang.

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