On 3/6/11 6:04 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Sunday 06 March 2011 09:34:07 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
bearophile:
UFCS is a huge hack that I hope to never see in D :-)
How is it a hack? I can understand there being implementation problems
that can make it undesirable to add, but calling it hack?
It's one of the most elegant syntax proposals I've ever seen! It
unifies objects and other functions in syntax. It improves
encapsulation by giving full support to non-member functions. It
improves modularity for the same reason.
With ufcs, there'd be no desire to add useless members due to
object syntax. Everything is equal - easy extensibility, better
protection, cleaner interfaces.
It's the opposite of a hack.
It is _not_ a hack. Whether it's desirable or not is another matter, but it is
_not_ a hack. And really, the term hack is very imprecise and often subjective.
It's the sort of accusation that pretty much kills any legitimate debate. It's
generally unsupportable and subjective, so it adds nothing to the debate, but it
has such a stink about it that it tends to make people avoid whatever was
declared to be a hack.
I set out to write a post with pretty much the same message. During our
long discussions about D2 at the Kahili coffee shop, one of us would
occasionally affix that label to one idea or another (often in an
attempt to make "I don't like it" seem stronger). It was very jarring.
Andrei
