On Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:39:23 -0500, Meta <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
I think it's not so much that enum doesn't always mean "enumeration" in D,
it doesn't in C or C++ either. It can be used to define bitfields,
whatever.
The point I think Andrei was trying to make is that enum in C and C++ does
what we want, we just need to extend the types it works with. To change
the name of enum would be catastrophic for existing D and C code, and to
create a new name for something so totally similar would be bikeshedding.
-Steve
