Re: Alias on an array element

[Igor via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 02:04:03 UTC, Meta wrote:
On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 01:12:38 UTC, solidstate1991 
wrote:
On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 01:09:56 UTC, solidstate1991 
wrote:
I'm making a struct for easy color handling Here's a code 
sample:

ublic struct Color{
        union{
		uint raw;	///Raw representation in integer form, also 
forces the system to align in INT32.
		ubyte[4] colors;	///Normal representation, aliases are used 
for color naming.
                ubyte alpha, red, green, blue;
        }
        version(LittleEndian){
                alias alpha = colors[0];
                alias red = colors[1];
                alias green = colors[2];
                alias blue = colors[3];
        }else{
                alias alpha = colors[3];
                alias red = colors[2];
                alias green = colors[1];
                alias blue = colors[0];
        }
}

All the aliases are fail to compile, have not found anything 
about it in any of the documentations I checked.

Edit: ubyte alpha, red, green, blue; was added so I can 
continue debugging after the refactoring until I find a 
solution.

You can only create aliases for symbols, not expressions. You 
could create accessor functions that return the appropriate 
indices.

Why not just do this:

version(LittleEndian) {
    ubyte alpha, red, green, blue;
} else {
    ubyte blue, green, red, alpha;
}

BTW. What platforms do you have in mind when thinking about 
BigEndian? I am curious because I usually consider BigEndian dead 
for my purposes.