On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 12:19:55 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer and the
language is so great that it works! You don't need to type
(*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!
I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will
never admit that they took that feature from D." (There is
probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to my
friend. :) )
Just about all higher languages does this, since the reference
type does not have members. Simula too.
But this unfortunately breaks down when you add smart-pointers,
which makes this approach unsound since pointer-type members
collide with object members.
So C++ actually got this right by requiring explicit
dereferencing.
The only case in which the C++ way is right is when there are two
member functions of the same name in the pointed-to object and
the smart pointer itself since you can disambiguate `ptr->get()`
from `ptr.get()`.
Atila
