On Monday, November 06, 2017 09:26:24 Satoshi via Digitalmars-d wrote: > Look, this operator does not break anything. If you don't want to > use it, just don't, but why do you force everyone else to not to > use it, just because it is not adding anything "more valuable" > than just better syntax?
_Everything_ that is added to the language complicates it further. It's one more thing that everyone learning the language has to learn and know and potentially deal with in code. Obviously, some things are worth the extra complication, or we'd all be programming in C, but there is always a cost to adding something, and the feature needs to be worth that cost. Granted, the elvis operator as proposed is not all that complicated, but adding it does make the language that much more complex, and it really doesn't do much. All it does is take the expression x ? x : y and make it x ?: y It saves 2 characters plus the length of the variable name. That's it. And it's optimizing an idiom that isn't going to tend to show up much in idiomatic D code. It seems to be targeted primarily at code that does a lot with classes and is written in such a way that it's not clear whether a class reference should be null or not, whereas most D code doesn't do much with classes. Rather, it does a lot with ranges and structs on the stack. Obviously, some code uses classes, and I expect that some code would benefit from the elvis operator, but I dispute that it's a common enough idiom to merit being added the language. Personally, while I frequently use the ternary operator, I almost never end up with the left and middle branches being the same, which is the only place that the elvis operator would be useful. And I don't think that Phobos does it much either. So, unless a lot of D code out there is using a drastically different coding style that does a lot with null, the elvis operator will not help much D code. So, IMHO, the elvis operator adds very little value, and I'd just as soon not see the language complicated further without adding real value in the process. So, I'll argue against it, but ultimately, it's not my decision. Rather, it's up to Walter and Andrei, and they'll decide what they decide. But don't expect anyone not to be unhappy about a feature being added to the language when they don't think that the feature adds value, because there is always a cost to a new feature. The difference is that you think that the feature is worth the cost, not that the folks who don't want to use the feature don't have to pay the cost. - Jonathan M Davis
