What I meant is: (0) Expand the templates at compile-time, in order to type-check the code. (1) Don't generate target language code for each specific instanti

What I meant is: (0) Expand the templates at compile-time, in order to type-check the code. (1) Don't generate target language code for each specific instantiation, though. (2) Re-expand the templates (or some representation of them) at runtime. It's a very silly implementation strategy, of course. But I don't see why it's fundamentally impossible to do this - it's just undesirable. And, yes, I agree about generics being better.