On Monday, 19 November 2012 at 09:37:35 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Monday, November 19, 2012 10:29:21 Rob T wrote:
the D language specification (which is currently MIA).
The online documentation _is_ the official spec, though it
definitely doesn't
have enough detail to be unambiguous, and in some cases, it's
not properly up-
to-date.
- Jonathan M Davis
Well yes, there is a spec, and it's pretty good in some areas,
but also just not precise enough in other areas, such with what
we're discussing in here. I'd like to see the mechanism
surrounding the copy/move semantics described in full details as
a part of the language spec, otherwise it's a bit risky to rely
on these behaviors if they are only considered as compiler
optimizations.
I know that Walter started D from the POV of a compiler
developer, so he probably does consider the optimizations to be a
part of the spec, but I'd like to see that in writing somewhere
to make it rock-solid official. There's mention of this in the
TDPL but again it's written as being an optimization, although
you could also get the impression is is a language feature, but
it's not exactly clear.
Note that I'm picking on this topic because it's a foundation
just about everything else it built up on, so it really needs to
be thoroughly documented as part of the spec.
--rt
