Sean Kelly wrote:
== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu ([EMAIL PROTECTED])'s article
(You may want to check your system's date, unless of course you traveled
in time.)
Russell Lewis wrote:
I'm of the opinion that we should make mixed-sign operations a
compile-time error. I know that it would be annoying in some
situations, but IMHO it gives you clearer, more reliable code.
The problem is, it's much more annoying than one might imagine. Even
array.length - 1 is up for scrutiny. Technically, even array.length + 1
is a problem because 1 is really a signed int. We could provide
exceptions for constants, but exceptions are generally not solving the
core issue.
Perhaps not, but the fact that constants are signed integers has been
mentioned as a problem before. Would making these polysemous
values help at all? That seems to be what your proposal is effectively
trying to do anyway.
Well with constants we can do many tricks; I mentioned an extreme
example. Polysemy does indeed help but my latest design (described in
the post starting this thread) gets away with simple subtyping. I like
polysemy (the name is really cool :o)) but I don't want to be
concept-heavy: if a classic technique words, I'd use that and save
polysemy for a tougher task that cannot be comfortably tackled with
existing means.
Andrei
