On Monday, 26 November 2012 at 19:59:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 11/27/2012 5:52 AM, David Nadlinger wrote:
I agree, and if I remember previous discussions on the subject
correctly, it seems like only Walter is in favor of upholding
the
current restrictions of "alias" parameters to symbols. I
simply do not
see a point in pushing compiler implementation details on the
user like
that – for the programmer, a type is a type is a type…
Walter, do you have an example of a situation where the alias
parameter
restriction would be beneficial? (for the D code involved, I
don't mean
the few lines of code avoided in the compiler)
In any case, it will break a great deal of existing code to
change that behavior.
The discussed issue is one of those inconsistencies that make
people struggle when using D. D's main selling point is rich
metaprogramming. Others are rapidly catching up in the field of
expressive native languages. If we set these early design
decisions in stone, it means we will not be able to compete with
them. And besides, are there many big proprietary D2 codebases
that you afraid? I doubt there are. And Manu actually represents
people who are willing to work on one, but are held off by these
issues. Open source projects however will be easily fixable, and
people using D will actually welcome these positive changes.
