On Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 17:02:02 UTC, Robert Clipsham
wrote:
On Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 16:32:18 UTC, Chris Williams
wrote:
On Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 16:08:26 UTC, Robert Clipsham
wrote:
D doesn't need this, you can implement monadic null checking
in the library:
By that argument, I can implement anything that D can do in
assembler, hence I don't need D.
I'm not sure I understand your point. I'm simply stating that
in D, right now, without adding any complexity to the language,
you can do:
just(myObject).method1().method2().method3()
You can't do that. You're reducing your example code - which was
several dozen lines and only applied to objects for which you had
added the special handler code - to the end result. After you've
laid the framework for doing this, yes, you can do it. But
there's a bunch of work that has to go into it before you get to
that point. (Also, your implementation is far less efficient than
something which rewrites the code as a bunch of nested "if (not
null)" checks.)
If your argument was that there are more important things for the
compiler team to work on, or that the syntax of the language was
already large enough without adding more things for people to
remember, then sure. But if we lived under the premise that
there's no reason to add features to a compiler that abstract
code down into a simpler syntax, then we'd have never developed
variables or functions.
