Christopher Wright wrote:
Don wrote:
I don't understand why runtime-determined array literals even exist.
They're not literals!!!
They cause no end of trouble. IMHO we'd be *much* better off without
them.
You don't see the use. I do. I would go on a murderous rampage if that
feature were removed from the language.
For example, one thing I recently wrote involved creating a process with
a large number of arguments. The invocation looked like:
exec("description", [procName, arg1, arg2] ~ generatedArgs ~ [arg3,
arg4] ~ moreGeneratedArgs);
There were about ten or fifteen lines like that.
You'd suggest I rewrite that how?
char[][] args;
args ~= procName;
args ~= arg1;
args ~= arg2;
args ~= generatedArgs;
args ~= arg3;
Just fucking shoot me. Or better yet, whoever removed array literals
with non-constant elements from the language.
Relax. It's a condition known as literalitis. :o)
Literals only have you write [ a, b, c ] instead of toArray(a, b, c). I
wouldn't see it a big deal one way or another, but the issue is that the
former is a one-time decision that pretty much can't be changed, whereas
toArray can benefit of the hindsight of experience.
Andrei
