On Friday, 5 October 2012 at 12:01:30 UTC, Piotr Szturmaj wrote:
Java and C# with their generics can do the following:
class List { }
class List<T> { }
List list = new List();
List<int> intList = new List<int>();
In D similar code can't work because we can't have both a type
and a template with the same name. So this code must be
rewritten to:
class List(T = Variant) { }
List!() list = new List!();
List!int intList = new List!int;
When template name is used as a type and it can be instantiated
with no parameters it could be automatically rewritten to
List!() by the compiler. That code would then look like this:
List list = new List;
List!int intList = new List!int;
The question is... is it possible to change D's behaviour to
avoid awkward !() template parameters _without_ breaking
backward compatibility?
Why to you need this?
Java and C# only allow this type of code due to backwards
compatibility, because their first version did not allow for
generics, and their creators did not want to force everyone to
recode their code bases.
--
Paulo
