On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:15 AM, dsimcha <dsim...@yahoo.com> wrote: > == Quote from Bill Baxter (wbax...@gmail.com)'s article >> We're going to vote complex types off the island, right? Maybe we >> could get rid of associative arrays as a built-in too. > > Aren't builtin complex types on the way out anyhow?
Right. That's what I meant. But I feared my tuple for complex exchange would not be accepted because the demise of complex was already announced. So I threw in associative arrays too. > (See > http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_complex.html). I always found them > to be > quite peculiar, as they really only are useful for a niche within a niche. > Specifically, noone outside scientific computing (already a small subset of > programmers) would use them, and even then, only a subset of scientific > computing > people need them. I personally do scientific computing (specifically > bioinformatics, which for those of you who aren't familiar with the field is > mostly stochastic models and data mining as applied to molecular biology), > and I > have never in my life used D's complex numbers. > > My guess is that Walter, having a mech e. degree, drastically overestimated > early > in D's design how many people actually use complex numbers. I know enough > mechanical and electrical engineers and physicists to know that they simply > love > complex numbers. Walter read a paper by a numerical math guy stating that some things just can't be done correctly if complex types aren't part of the language. And I guess it seemed true at the time. But since then they have figured out a way to make the compiler clever enough to handle such cases correctly even without it being built-in. --bb
