On Wednesday, December 26, 2012 23:02:25 deadalnix wrote: > Sound like the wayt o go for me. But is ato ref needed in such > case ? Why not simply allow ref to behave that way ?
Because there's a very large difference between a function intended to take arguments by ref and one where you don't care. For instance, what if popFrontN suddenly accepted rvalues? Using it with rvalues would do nothing. We had problems with std.conv.parse precisely because there was a compiler bug that allowed you to pass string literals to it in spite of the fact that it takes its argument by ref and needs to mutate its argument. With auto ref, you're specifically saying that you don't care whether the function is given an lvalue or rvalue. You just want it to avoid unnecessary copies. That's very different. And auto ref then not only then protects you from cases of passing an rvalue to a function when it needs an lvalue, but it makes it clear in the function signature which is expected. - Jonathan M Davis
