On Saturday, 31 January 2015 at 07:19:47 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 1/30/15 11:00 PM, eles wrote:
On Friday, 30 January 2015 at 18:08:15 UTC, Gary Willoughby
wrote:
On Friday, 30 January 2015 at 14:47:22 UT
How is anything about specifying the length of a constant array
revolutionary?
No. This is not revolutionary, but you are making of it a such
fearsome perspective that one's feels like it will gonna blow
away the language.
And when I spoke about the revolution that might be wrong, I
didn't speak about this.
But precisely of this:
The wrong revolution in D is the GC.
Yes, in that respect, D was revolutionary. And wrong.
A lot of effort, see the recent threads about embedded and
realtime, are just wasted energy to alleviate the outcomes of
this one bad choice. It seems that the hardest fight the D users
have to tackle is with the GC. Just have a look at all the
efforts made in this direction (even the allocators and so on),
and especially at the *abandoned efforts*.
Anyway, I did not want to develop the topic on this thread
because i is a different thing.
Certainly, you end up by being both conservative and
revolutionary. But,
neither when it is needed.
I really support the syntax. Because makes one quirk less.
Special syntax for a niche case instead of using a function...
looks one quirk more, not less.
It looks to you that suddenly being forced to go from:
int[3] x = [1, 2, 3];
to
staticArray!(int, auto) sarray = [1, 2, 3];
or from
auto[$][][$] = [
[[1,2]],
[[3,4], [5,6]],
[[7,8], [9,10], [11,12]],
];
to
alias s = staticArray;
auto arr = staticArray(
[[1,2].s],
[[3,4].s, [5,6].s],
[[7,8].s, [9,10].s, [11,12].s],
);
is a kind of clear, crisp and obvious change?
Frankly, the latter example ae rather a special syntax, not the
first one. There, the meaning is almost clear: "I want static
string of a length that I don't want to spend effort in order to
count it by hand".
Don't tell me that you did never count characters on the screen
with the keyboard, mouse or the finger?
Now, look again at the examples above and *then* ask yourself
which is the more unnatural and special syntax.
God, you cannot even get away of that "auto" (which translates
into: "I, as a designer, I hide my inability to define a clear
syntax here behind this sugar of auto").
So, as I was telling, you manage to be both revolutionary and
conservative, just both wrong.
You went the revolutionary road with the GC and so on, sparkling
a lot of effort and discussions just to cope with that wrong
choice, but you held on onto it, with the determination of
IndburIII.
Then, you fight with all your energy against little things that
will much sweeten the language, fearful of changes because, after
doing one wrong, you fear even the good ones. And you call this
being "cautious".
Whatever, anyway.
