On 02/22/2013 07:30 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
Am Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:38:48 -0800
schrieb Ali Çehreli <[email protected]>:
I appreciate everybody's contributions to D but that is not an
intention, that is a change to dmd that caused a regression. A syntax
that used to work in the previous version simply stopped working in
2.062. That is the definition of a regression. Normally, regressions are
fixed as quickly as possible.
I have a feeling that there must have been some newsgroup discussions as
well but unfortunately I must have been busy with other things at the
time. Not all of us read github.
Ali
No, this was not meant to be a feature. It slipped in and
people started using it. It's like being able to break "scope"
parameters by storing aliases to what's inside of them.
It is nothing like that.
See https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1187/files#L0R2780
It is explicitly handled in the code. Looking at the code for two
seconds reveals that this syntax is being added.
If you rely on that now and it is fixed in a future version, it's not
a regression.
Maybe it is not a regression. In any case it is a breaking language
change. (also holds for the scope stuff; there is no spec for it.)
That said I started using "alias this = ..." as well and was
surprised it was removed, but noticed it in time as a DFeed
line on IRC.
There is no justification for this.
I guess the main issue is that alias blah this; shouldn't have made it
into the grammar in the first place. But this was obviously done in
order to establish a broken analogy to the other uses of alias. Either
alias this=blah; must be kept or the alias this syntax should be
deprecated in favour of a specially named member function.
