On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 02:33:31 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
My personal opinion is that constructors that throw are an
execrable programming practice, and I've wanted to ban them.
(Andrei, while sympathetic to the idea, felt that too many
people relied on it.) I won't allow throwing constructors in
dmd or any software I have authority over.
Wow. I'm surprised by this.
I expect that you'd have a riot on your hands though if you
actually tried to push for getting rid of throwing constructors.
A generation of programmers have been mislead down a deep rabbit
hole thinking that "Constructors" are things that "Construct"
objects.
This has to led to a generation of vaguely smelly code that "does
too much work in the constructor" (of which throwing exceptions
is evidence).
The last few years I have told myself (and anyone who doesn't
back away fast enough) that "Constructors" do _not_ construct
objects, they are "Name Binders." (Sort of like lisp's "let"
macro)
They bind instance variable names to pre-existing sub-objects.
This attitude coupled with an a rule of thumb, "make it immutable
unless I prove to myself that I _need_ it to be mutable" has led
to a major improvement in my code.
