Christopher Wright wrote:
Don wrote:
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;
Of course not. These runtime 'array literals' are just syntax sugar
for a constructor call. Really, they are nothing more.
I'm quite surprised that there is a runtime function for this. I would
expect codegen to emit something like:
array = __d_newarray(nBytes)
array[0] = exp0
array[1] = exp1
...
At worst, it would be something like:
exec("description", createArray(procName, arg1, arg2) ~ generatedArgs
~ createArray(arg3, arg4) ~ moreGeneratedArgs);
PHP does this. I haven't used PHP enough to hate it.
I've used PHP a fair bit, and I don't hate its array syntax at all.
(There are plenty of other things in PHP to hate, though.) It's easily
readable, and not much of a hassle to write. But array() in PHP isn't a
function, it's a language construct with special syntax. To create an
AA, for instance, you'd write
$colours = array("apple" => "red", "pear" => "green");
I'm not sure what the D equivalent of that one should be.
-Lars
