What you are suggesting makes perfect sense. IMHO the biggest
source of waste in any language both natural and contrived (and
with many things outside of languages) is inconsistency. The more
differences and incompatibilities there are between the various
constructs, the more complexity is introduced into the system,
often needlessly. Even if you have to fake it, making x
consistent with y is often worth doing, and IMO it can be done
with zero cost in terms of performance and other forms of
overhead.
Unfortunately D was modeled after C++, a legacy language built on
top of an inconsistent foundation. Even though D is an
improvement, I think D has inherited at its foundation a
crippling affect that will be impossible to shake off fully. The
language would have to fundamentally change to become consistent.
No matter, as you've suggested (and I think shown), D can still
be adjusted to get rid of at least some of the crippling effects
of inconsistency, and even a small fix to an inconsistency can
potentially create a big improvement.
--rt
