Re: developing a paper for constexpr, that's an interesting idea. I hadn't really thought about writing one up myself but it'd be an interesting thing to try out. Can you recommend a good example proposal that I could read? Shoot me an email at nicholas dot clark on the gmail if you ever see this.
But it's also not exactly -complete-. The standards committee makes changes every few years, including language additions.
I'm a fulltime C programmer, and I would _love_ to have both of the features I suggested - for the following reasons.
- defer: I could defer a free() statement after every malloc, guaranteeing that I won't miss one or forget about it. Lots of memory leaks and file-descriptor leaks could be easily avoided if C provided 'defer' as a language feature. GCC already offers something kind of similar with its __cleanup__ attribute, and a lot of programs rely on it. How much better would it be for the language to support it natively?
- constexpr: I am _so tired_ of writing really complex macros. Like say I want to populate a lookup table for a sine-wave (for fast use in a realtime system). Wouldn't it be nice if I could just populate my lookup table with a constexpr function? Then I wouldn't need really nasty macros, and I'd also be able to ensure that the calculations all happen at compile-time.
I'll buy an extra copy if you can get 'defer' in there too!
Those two features would really be the bee's knees :)