On 2008-12-04 18:54:32 +0100, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Fawzi Mohamed wrote:
On 2008-12-01 22:30:54 +0100, Walter Bright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Fawzi Mohamed wrote:
On 2008-12-01 21:16:58 +0100, Walter Bright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I'm very excited about polysemy. It's entirely original to D,
I accused Andrei of making up the word 'polysemy', but it turns out it
is a real word! <g>
Is this the beginning of discriminating overloads also based on the
return values?
No. I think return type overloading looks good in trivial cases, but as
things get more complex it gets inscrutable.
I agreee that return type overloading can go very bad, but a little bit
can be very nice.
Polysemy make more expressions typecheck, but I am not sure that I want that.
For example with size_t & co I would amost always want a stronger
typechecking, as if size_t would be a typedef, but with the usual rules
wrt to ptr_diff, size_t,... (i.e. not cast between them).
This because mixing size_t with int, or long is almost always
suspicious, but you might see it only on the other platform (32/64
bit), and not on you own.
Something that I would find nice on the other hand is to have a kind of
integer literals that automatically cast to the type that makes more
sense.
Wouldn't value range propagation take care of that (and actually more)?
A literal such as 5 will have a support range [5, 5] which provides
enough information to compute the best type down the road.
Andrei
Exactly, my point was to apply this only to integer literals, if I had
understood correctly you thought to apply it to everything.
As I said with size_t & co actually I would like a tighter control, and
range propagation gives me a more lax control.
With integer literals on the other hand I think range propagation or
similar is a good idea.
(because there I am sure that preserving the value is the correct choice)
Fawzi
