On Thursday, 4 July 2013 at 23:52:35 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Where does the whole "stronger typing" comes in? This is
poppycock. We need real arguments here.
Maybe it's a matter of definitions, for me having "null" as
literal for empty array, null pointer, empty associative array,
and more is more weakly typed compared to having a literal like
[] usable only for empty dynamic arrays (and strings), a
literal as [:] usable only for empty associative arrays, and
null for pointers, class references (and little else like a
Nullable).
Bye,
bearophile
While I agree with the need to have a literal for non-initialized
arrays and another one for initialized but empty arrays, that is
null and [] respectively, I can't see the necessity for [:]. The
literal should be used to mark the difference between null and
empty, not the difference between plain or associative, shouldn't
it?
For me, having to type
int[string] foo = [:];
instead of
int[string] foo = []; // same semantic
would just be a source of confusion.
