On 08.07.2017 19:16, kdevel wrote:
I wonder if this distinction is meaningful
Not nearly as much as it would need to be to justify the current behavior. It's mostly a historical accident.
and---if not---why it is exposed to the application programmer so prominently.
I don't think there is a good reason except backwards-compatibility. Also see: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/4623(This is the pull request that restored the bad behaviour after it had been fixed.)
