On Wednesday, 3 April 2013 at 02:28:55 UTC, Chris Cain wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 April 2013 at 01:30:19 UTC, ixid wrote:
How can you call the new syntax better? You assign arrays'
lengths in the opposite to that that you access them. It's a
horrible design mistake.
Unfortunately, I have to agree that the new syntax is better.
int[5][6] is confusing as a type because it's read from right
to left, but it makes much more sense than int[6][5].
Consider how you would read the "old style"
It's a 6-long array of 5-long arrays of int.
So, the new style is simply read from right to left. But using
the other way ... it's read from the center to right, and
finally to the front.
How about throwing AAs into the mix?
int[string][5][6]
What would that mean? The old style would be incredibly
confusing. It'd be an associative array mapping strings to
5-long arrays of 6-long arrays of ints. Right?
Plus consider this:
alias Dict = int[string]
Dict[5][6] vs int[string][5][6]
Using the new way, these two are the same. Using the "old
style" ... they're not.
Really though, bearophile has it right. C (and, D,
transitively) made a huge mistake in type declarations. They
ought to be read from left to right (like Pascal). C is crazy
in that they've designed it so you read types in a spiral
pattern.
What's a int*? It's a pointer to an int. Why isn't it a *int,
then? How about [5]int? It's a 5-long array of int. [5][6]int
... It's a 5-long array of 6-long arrays of integers. And so on.
I wasn't arguing for the old style, the new declarations should
have read from left to right so [6][5][string]int and then you
access the elements in the same order that you assigned them,
that seems far less confusing and leaves less room for sleepy
mistakes. It seems like a pointless mental overhead so have to
keep swapping the order of your arguments.
