On Friday, 27 July 2018 at 10:30:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
It evolved out of D's member function call syntax for arrays -
basically, for years before we had UFCS in D, we had UFCS for
arrays. However, when and how that was added to arrays, I don't
know. I don't recall it ever not being in the language, but I
never used D1, and I don't know if it had it. At minimum, it's
been in D since early D2, if not much earlier. I'd have to do a
lot of spelunking through old releases to figure out when it
was added.
Certainly, the origins of UFCS in D do not come from making it
possible to extend user-defined types with member functions. It
comes from wanting member function call syntax when using
arrays (probably aimed primarily at strings, but I don't know).
It's just that later it was proposed to extend it so that it
would work with any type and thus make the member function call
syntax universal.
This compiles in DMD 0.50 (oldest version on the download page,
nov 20, 2002), so I think it's safe to say it's been around for a
while:
void fun(int[] arr) {}
void main() {
int[] a;
a.fun();
}
Arrays' .reverse, .sort and others were added in 0.24, but I
can't find a download for anything before 0.50.
--
Simen
