On Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:48:50 -0500, Cooler <kul...@hotbox.ru> wrote:
Please understand - I am not against void foo(int[] x){}
From an earlier post by you:
May be just prohibit at language level the case of fun3() function, to
do not allow unpredictable behavior?
I thought that this meant you were against it?
I am for predictability of behavior. You suggest to describe function's
behavior in documentation - quotation from your article "It is a good
idea to note in the documentation how the passed in slice might or might
not be
overwritten." My idea is that all potential errors must be detected as
soon as possible.
You cannot eradicate all errors. The intentions of a function are not
apparent to the compiler. Maybe the intention is to use the argument as a
buffer, and the caller should not care what happens to the buffer inside
the function.
Adding yet another attribute is going to increase language complexity for
almost no benefit. It does not guarantee unambiguity because you have no
idea what the author of the function is going to do.
The D principle - "The program compile and runs as expected, or not
compile at all".
This is a fantasy. The compiler cannot know what you expect.
If you really need to call function that can change content of an array,
but cannot change size of an array the language syntax should allow
express it in function signature. I consider "void fun(int[] const x){}"
more error prone than "void fun(int[] x){}" and for the caller and for
implemeter.
Not sure if something is mixed up there. I think void fun(int[] x) is
sufficient to describe what you say. The function cannot alter x's array
bounds at all, and can alter it's data.
I see very little value in that. We don't need to obliterate a
tremendous amount of slice usage (not mentioning how much code will
have to be updated) in order to help newbies understand how slices
work.
Any idea can be rejected by this sentence.
No, only ideas that force people to change millions of lines of code, and
provide scant benefits instead of taking 5 minutes to explain "no, just
use x[0..2] = [1, 2]" or "just use ref int[] x" depending on the goal.
-Steve
