On Mon, 12 May 2014 16:36:12 -0400, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
It's been brought up more than once that the 'scope' storage class is an
unimplemented borrowed pointer. But thinking a bit more along those
lines, actually 'ref' fills the role of a borrowed pointer.
One particularly apropos behavior is that struct member functions pass
'this' by ref, meaning that members can be called without the inc/dec
millstone.
ref is still incomplete as far as this goes, but we can go the extra
distance with it, and then it will be of great help in supporting any
ref counting solution.
Hm... the one piece that I think would be damaging is to not be able to
take an address of the 'this' reference. It's probably OK to just use
pointers and static functions in some cases, but member functions do not
have that luxury. In other words, operators.
Big example would be a doubly linked list used with ~=.
-Steve
