[fbender]

If I’m not mistaken, you can even have the best of both worlds in languages with proper macro support (I’m sure you know which lang I‘m talking about): The Macro call can take the string input and „desugar“ it into bitmasks / function calls / whatever you need at compile time. Then you have:

1) easily readable, string-like input; 2) built-in-your-code verification and 3) compile-time check; 4) zero-overhead execution.

Just reading Ted‘s blog post gave me an idea how lang-specific libraries / (thin-layer) abstractions (or simply additional magic helper functionality) can improve upon legacy API designs (e.g. the GLX example) by using lang-specific functionality I never knew I‘d need or even cared about. Sometimes one can learn when you‘d never expect it. :D

Unless I‘m mistaken and misunderstood the whole thing, please correct me in that case.

[protomyth]

I think the issue is that for most languages you have to update the libraries with the new constants for bit-wise operations and not for the string approach. Some languages would be fine, but this is multi-language in the end.