On Tuesday, 14 January 2014 at 08:43:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Tuesday, 14 January 2014 at 08:36:53 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
You'll have to get used to the exclamation mark, otherwise
you'll never be able to fully appreciate D's generic
programming. I quite like it - I don't think there's anything
objectively ugly about it.
You subjectively think that there is nothing objectively ugly
about it? :-) It is objectively ugly because "!" implies a
boolean expression, but that is off-topic.
This argument is stupid. It's the same argument as the famous
"Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man", or the
"please put `I think...` in front of all your sentences!"
argument.
The burden of proof is on the person who first claims it's
deficient. Saying that I can't think of anything objectively
wrong with it serves the purpose of inviting Manu to provide some
kind of argument, as I can't think of anything *obviously* wrong
about it that goes unsaid.
It's common to overload tokens in programming languages, and it's
usually only a problem for beginners who aren't used to the
particular language's choice of overloads yet (Ruby is good
example of a language with rather extreme token reuse) - humans
are pretty good at context-sensitive parsing. From a
character-by-character perspective it's particularly common, with
the bitwise shift operators having nothing to do with
comparisons, bitwise xor having nothing to do with exponents etc.
Regardless of whether binary ! is "ugly" or not, it's still
better than introducing language features left and right to avoid
templates, and it's still better than C++'s template
instantiation syntax :)
I agree that chaining of filters and sorting rules is a good
solution, provided that you have a high level optimizer capable
of transforming the chain into something optimal. You basically
need some sort of term-rewriting.
LDC and GDC are capable of unravelling the (fairly thin)
abstraction. All it requires is the ability to inline direct
function calls to small functions - the aforementioned compilers
always have this capability for templated functions.
DMD is hit and miss, but I think there was a recent improvement
to its inliner... luckily this is still the domain of
micro-optimization.
