On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 16:06:44 UTC, Tyler Jameson Little
wrote:
On Friday, 31 May 2013 at 00:57:33 UTC, Minas Mina wrote:
I don't think this is useful.
At least when I see "auto" in the code I immediately
understand what's going on, whereas with this proposal I have
to double check my code to see if it's ":=" or "=".
First off, I write a _lot_ of Go code, and I _love_ the :=
there. It makes things nice and simple, and it fits nicely into
the rest of the Go syntax. However, I don't think it belongs in
D because it changes the flow of the code.
The problem is where type specifiers are expected to go. In D
(and most other C-like languages), types go before the
identifiers:
int x, y, z;
When scanning code, if I see a type identifier, I know it's
declaring something. I immediately know the scope and all is
well.
In Go, types go after the identifiers:
func example(x, y, z int) {}
This is only broken by var|type, which are completely different
expressions.
For Go, the := makes perfect sense, because when you read Go
code, you expect the identifier first, then the type. In D
however, nothing else (correct me if I'm wrong) has this syntax.
I have no problem with the := syntax, I just think it doesn't
make syntactic sense. It subtly breaks the idioms of the
language, all for very little gain.
So maybe =: for D? :P
Naa, just kidding.
I would be okay with type blocks, or the presented math {}
block (which could do all sorts of new and exciting things)
because that would fit more nicely into the language.
If the OP really wants this, he/she can easily write a
pre-processor for D code that he/she uses on his/her own
personal projects. A completely untested regex:
rsync src compilable-source
find compilable-source/ -name "*.d" -exec sed -i
"s/\(\\w+\)\\s*:=/auto \1 =/g" {}+
There, feature done in two lines of shell...
+1
AFAIK Namespace (user with such nickcname) already wrote
preprocesor for D with syntax candies he likes.
I bet if math guys were so interested in D they would do the same
at some point.
I personally don't care about that :=. Probably won't use as I am
already familiar and fine with auto. I believe though that
letting achieving same thing in different ways will just bring
troubles.
