On 11/1/2014 6:25 PM, bearophile wrote:
As the designer of the language you have to look at code written by other people
too! Because your D code is probably very different from mine. Take a look at
Haskell code, Rust code, Erlang code, and learn new idioms and new paradigms. In
the long run this will help D more than fixing a couple more bugs.
I don't see the use cases, in mine or other code. There's a reason why people
always trot out printf - it's about the only one. Designing a language feature
around printf is a mistake.
it is very rare that I pass arguments to functions that would benefit from
compile time checking.
To me this happens. It doesn't happen all the time. As usual it's not easy to
quantify the frequency of such cases. (On the other hand your "very rare" is
unsupported by statistical evidence as well. Your judgement is probably better
than mine, of course and I respect your opinions).
I've considered the feature, and looked at code. It just doesn't happen very
often.
All features have a cost/benefit to them. The costs are never zero. Laying on
more and more features of minor benefit will destroy the language, and even you
won't use it.
For those that might, there's always a rethinking of the
feature, such as with printf/writefln.
I regard D writefln as currently _broken_.
Oh come on. writefln is typesafe and will not crash.
You could also write:
formattedwrite!"the format string %s %d"(args ...)
if you like. The fact that nobody has bothered to suggests that it doesn't add
much value over writefln().
