On Saturday, 30 July 2016 at 19:21:27 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I think that Walter's answer in those bug reports is pretty clear. An alias parameter aliases a symbol. Basic types are keywords, not symbols, so they can't be passed as an argument to an alias parameter.
alias bind to builtin types. There is no reason alias parameter shouldn't.
Having alias bind to basic type is some cases and not in others is just plain retarded. You can always look at each example individually and conclude that's fine. And, in fact, that's fine, when each of these is taken individually.
But when you look at the whole, it just doesn't add up.
And I confess that I don't know why you'd even want to.
Unless that it is a polite way to say "it's useless", this show more lack of imagination than an actual problem with binding builtins.
Anyway, the use case is not super common, but it happened to me in the past, and resulted in great puzzling. Especially since, alias parameter freaking bind to values (which are not symbols either) and alias declaration do not.
The whole thing is completely messed up.
