On Sunday, 24 June 2018 at 22:25:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Sunday, June 24, 2018 22:03:13 Dennis via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
On Saturday, 23 June 2018 at 02:14:04 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
> [...]
I don't see why allowing one to omit the parens makes porting
C code harder.
It makes it harder if the language does not have parens on if
statements, while loops, etc., because then you have to remove
them from all of the code that you're porting. Having them be
optional shouldn't make porting harder. The OP's post said
nothing about making them optional, just complained that they
were in the language, so I posted based on the assumption that
they were arguing for their removal from the language. However,
optional parens would make it more confusing when reading code
(since then you have to figure out whether parens go with the
if or the expression in the conditional), and it's the sort of
thing that's just going to start style wars.
Also, usually, I hear about how folks _like_ D's syntax and
find it easy to learn, whereas many complain about the syntax
in languages such as Rust (it's my understanding that folks
tend to like Rust in spite of its syntax, not because of it).
So, it seems a bit odd to try and emulate them.
Regardless, personally, I don't want to have to deal with
reading code that omits parens on if statements and loops. It
just makes the language less consistent and makes it more work
to read code (as well as opening the door for yet more
arguments about the style guidelines on projects). Obviously,
others can disagree, but I'd vote strongly against any attempt
to change D in this regard.
- Jonathan M Davis
FWIW, a lot of people I try and get in to D complain about the
template syntax. "What're all those exclamation marks
everywhere??!!" - Every. Single. Time. And as soon as you see
__traits code anywhere you can say good bye to any aesthetic
pleasures. There're things in every language you just have to get
used to looking at and at some point things just start to look
nice. After a while I didn't even think objective-c bracket hell
was too bad :p
Cheers,
- Ali
