Andrei Alexandrescu:
I personally use the implicit concatenation on occasion and it doesn't trip me, but I wouldn't mind adding a ~.
While it's not a very common bug, it has tripped me few times. This is where I raised the issue in 2010: https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3827 Walter agreed to remove it: http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=121830
I feel changing string concatenation right now is just thinking small.
Fixing a little design mistake that causes bugs is not stopping all the other people like you from thinking about the more significant issues like concurrency, parallelism, reference scope, synchronized, and so on. Probably 80% of the bugs in Bugzilla are about very small things, like a missing assert, a wrong error message, or even wrong words used in documentation. Fixing those things is useful. Just because a problem is waiting for a fix in Bugzilla for years can't justify to close it down. In Bugzilla there are some other little breaking changes waiting to happen.
There are operator precedence-related problems caused by replacing the implicit concatenation with a ~.
But in a way that's beside the point. I'd much rather make non-breaking improvements to the language, as there are plenty of opportunities.
I don't agree. It's much better to fix the little breaking changes now, and think about non-breaking improvements later. Because later the breaking changes will become less and less possible.
Bye, bearophile
