On Tuesday, 5 August 2014 at 09:42:26 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
But I don't think this path is all that new… so I hope Walter,
if he continues walking down this path, remains unrelenting and
keeps walking past "assert as assume" until he finds truly new
territory in the realm of formal methods. That could happen and
bring great features to D.
This! +1000!
This is what I've been feeling too: Walter is wrong -
astonishingly wrong in fact - but in a very interesting direction
that may have something very 'right' on the other side of it. I
don't know what form it will take, but the example
someone gave, of keeping track of when a range is sorted vs. not
known to be sorted, to me gives a hint of where this may lead. I
can't quite imagine that particular example playing out, but in
general if the compiler keeps track of properties of things then
it could start making algorithmic-level performance decisions
that today we always have to make by hand. To me that's
interesting.
