On 1/6/2013 11:31 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
I am sure that very good progress is being made. However, the forward reference
error problem will need formal treatment at some point. I think one reason they
pop up is that symbol lookup for the intended language is inherently impossible
to compute.
A huge source of fwd ref problems was not at all about symbol lookup. It was
about partial types referencing properties of themselves. For example,
struct S {
int a;
int b = S.sizeof;
int c;
}
for a simple example. There've been all kinds of variations on this theme, some
of them wickedly complicated, but always boiling down to the same general issue.
Some forward ref regressions have cropped up because the compiler now does a
better job of checking if there is enough of the type computed to get the
desired property. Formerly, it would just return an incorrect size (for
example). (I do not know if this is the case for your example, yet.)
