On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 05:49:44AM +0100, Tommi wrote: > On Tuesday, 6 November 2012 at 04:31:56 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > >The problem is that you can't do this in generic code, because > >generic code by definition doesn't know how to copy an arbitrary > >type. > > I'm not familiar with that definition of generic code. But I do feel > that there's a pretty big problem with a language design if the > language doesn't provide a generic way to make a copy of a variable. > To be fair, e.g. C++ doesn't provide that either.
OK I worded that poorly. All I meant was that currently, there is no generic way to make a copy of something. It could be construed to be a bug or a language deficiency, but that's how things are currently. One *could* introduce a new language construct for making a copy of something, of course, but that leads to all sorts of issues about implicit allocation, how to eliminate unnecessary implicit copying, etc.. It's not a simple problem, in spite of the simplicity of stating the problem. T -- Verbing weirds language. -- Calvin (& Hobbes)
