36 activations of term rewriting macro?

[kaushalmodi]

I took an example from the Nim Manual's TRM section: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#term-rewriting-macros

The example is almost as-is except that I added a debugEcho so that I know if/when the TRM is getting activated:

template mulIsCommutative{`*`(a, b)}(a, b: int): int =
  debugEcho("-> Term rewriting activated!")
  b * a

let x = 3
echo "Calculating x * 2:"
echo x * 2

Surprisingly that prints:

Calculating x * 2:
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
-> Term rewriting activated!
6

Ref: https://gitter.im/nim-lang/Nim?at=5bbe2eb6bbdc0b25051a4d02

what happens is that diverging rewrite rules get cancelled at some point - Araq

/cc @Araq