On Sun, 31 May 2009 23:24:09 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu <[email protected]> wrote:
> Another alternative would be to allow implicitly casting arrays of any > type to const(ubyte)[] which is always safe. But I think this is too > much ado about nothing - you're avoiding the type system to start with, > so use ubyte, insert a cast, and call it a day. If you have too many > casts, the problem is most likely elsewhere so that argument I'm not > buying. I've thought about this for a bit. If we allow any *non-reference* type except void[] to implicitly cast to ubyte[], but still allow implicitly casting ubyte[] to void[], it will put ubyte[] in the perfect spot in the type hierarchy - it'll allow safely (portability issues notwithstanding) getting the representation of value-type (POD) arrays, while still allowing abstracting it even further to the "might have pointers" type - at which point it is unsafe to access individual bytes, which void[] disallows without casts. -- Best regards, Vladimir mailto:[email protected]
