Wow! I am glad to see so many responses! Thanks for your
indulgence.
So, to summarize, the concept (no pun intended) has been around
for a while in D---originally in the context of arrays. It just
might have been a bug, or an unintended side-effect. I intend to
read the archival posts and might have something to say later.
--
Sameer
PS: I realize that I am a stickler for history, or rather
historical contexts related to technology or research that I am
involved in, and more recently regarding programming language
concepts. The culprit is probably the fact that I have been
teaching programming languages course (or, taught one semester of
it, and plan to teach it again in Spring) which has allowed me to
learn of the origins of so many concepts which we sometimes take
for granted today, but were part of some old languages.
PS1: I didn't want to respond to a particular thread, but there
is no way in this forum to write a generic response to multiple
posts so I am picking one as the anchor.
