On Friday, 28 February 2014 at 19:09:06 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
For a *VERY* short time (I think one version perhaps), we had
the 'manifest' keyword which was supposed to mean manifest
constant.
It was removed, Andrei was a very stanch supporter of enum
being the manifest constant keyword. This comment in an early
debate about what became the inout feature is pretty
explanatory:
https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1961#c3
"And enum... you'll have to yank that out from my dead cold
hands. Extending
enum instead of adding yet another way of defining symbolic
constants is The
Right Thing to do. I am sure people would have realized how
ridiculous the
whole "manifest" thing is if we first proposed it. We just
can't define one
more way for each kind of snow there is."
-Steve
Hmm, I didn't know that. Interesting. I think this was a mistake
on Andrei's part, though. The concept of enumerations doesn't
have anything to do with evaluating an expression at compile time
other than how it's implemented in D and C++, so overloading the
keyword to mean "evaluate this expression at compile time" does
not seem like a good choice.
