Re: A few Wild and Wooly Proposals, while we're here (was Re: Feature request: userdata slice)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think C++11's way of defining new literals is pretty reasonable. You
> define a suffix operator (which must start with _) and when literals
> appear with that suffix, it's translated at compile time (in Lua's
> case, bytecode generation time) to a call to that function

But (and this is crucial) any resulting object creation is not hoisted
out. For instance, in languages with regexp literals /.../, the
literal is replaced with a reference to a compiled regexp object.
They effectively become constants.  If I see a 'date literal' like
D'2015-08-24' in Lua I know that this string will be parsed _each
time_ - it isn't really a literal.

Code generation for true custom literals would get pretty involved.  I
don't think the prettiness is worth the bother.