Walter Bright:
Because every cast breaks the type system. A type system that
requires too many casts for normal things is NOT a type safe
system.
I have explained this on numerous occasions.
You have discussed many times about the unsafety of casts and I
agree with your point of view. I try to reduce the number of
casts as much as possible in my code (and recently I have
replaced many "cast(double)x" with nice "double(x)", as time
passes D allows to remove more and more casts from the code, this
is an improvement).
You see I care of casts also from the little casts statistic I've
done on your Warp:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/lhf0u6$2r80$1...@digitalmars.com?page=3#post-wjjivmmeyeismgkntwsj:40forum.dlang.org
Or from answers I keep giving in D.learn, where I suggest to
minimize the usage of casts:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/efbjrtwqywkhfybmy...@forum.dlang.org
But since I follow D development and I write D code I don't
remember any kind of discussion regarding the specific
disadvantages of a stronger typed enum. This means answering
questions like: what does it happen if D enums become strongly
typed? How many casts is this going to cause in D code? Is it
true that such enum casts are going to be worse than type
unsafety of the current design? I don't remember seeing any
little study that shows that stronger casts in D increase a lot
the number of casts. Perhaps this little study was done before I
have started to use D1 and I have missed it.
I suspect that in my D code most cast usage does not need casts
if you replace them with stronger casts as the "enum class" of
C++11, but I have no proof of this.
Bye,
bearophile
