On 22/02/2026 13:32, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> Also, the more I look at code examples using this, the less I like the
>> name. It didn't tell me what it does. All assertions are compiled, what is
>> a "compile assert"? Assert that something compiles, i.e. is syntactically
>> valid? That's what a requires expression does, but it's not what this does.
>
> I call this compiler_assert(), which I think is a better name.
I've added your compiler_assert suggestion to my draft edit, I'm definitely keen to discuss and choose the most appropriate name.
You've probably heard this story - but I'll share it:
When Dennis Richie was asked what he would change about UNIX if he could do it again, it he said he would add an 'e' on creat().
Nit: It wasn't Dennis Ritchie who said that, but Ken Thompson.
(See
The UNIX Programming Environment (1984),
page 204; also Peter Salus's 1994 book
A Quarter Century of Unix,
page 43. (Salus writes that Doug McIlroy's candidate for biggest mistake was his originally spelling
UNIX in all caps. ;))
Off-topic: Another anecdote from that book, one that was news to me, this time actually from Dennis Ritchie—
I guess there were a few new [programs] that were written in B. One of the earlier ones was the thing that did the expansion of stars and whatnot in filenames: the `glob` command. [Rather than the shell program doing this expansion itself, the shell would do it by invoking an external program.] This stood for `global`, for reasons that escape me; it's not very sensible.
)
Cheers,
Arthur