On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 23:07:43 UTC, Solomon E wrote:
The D spec is full of errors, literally, or teasers sometimes.
....
Erroneous code should be omitted from a spec, or at least
clearly marked such as by a red background.
I'd like to respond critically to my own silly comment.
It's a great achievement that D has so many features, more
versatility than C++, and yet the same few pages can serve as
both the language specification and as the language reference for
experienced D programmers, and also as an introduction to D
features for programmers new to D, and include sufficient
examples of what should cause errors as well as what should be
valid code. It helps make the language lighter to pick up and
better maintained than if it had separate long books of official
information for each of those 5 purposes.
So the complaint that errors should have a "red background" is
classic bikeshedding about what color to paint the bikeshed. Most
people don't have any difficulty seeing "// error" at or near the
end of a line as a clear marker that the whole line is an error
before they start reading the line as if it might be valid,
shifting their intuition of what the text is trying to say, then
have the ending surprise them. Most people don't turn around and
then think "// ok" is a surprise ending either. Most people don't
have any difficulty scanning for sets of valid formulas or
sentences to use, or scanning for sets of errors or mistakes to
avoid, when incorrect and correct lines are interspersed randomly
in a reference or textbook.
Most programmers can handle languages that reverse the order of
"if" statements or the order of declaration and use just as well.
So putting the indicators of whether a line is an error or
correct at the end of a line is an arbitrary, harmless choice.
If a significant number of people did have any problem with that,
it would have been cleaned up already. So obviously it isn't a
problem and it's just a ridiculous, whiny complaint.
