grauzone wrote:
Don wrote:
Ary Borenszweig wrote:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP6
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. What's the problem
being solved?
Attaching additional data to types, that can't be specified otherwhere.
This should help with metaprogramming-like stuff.
For example serialization. How do you specify that a field shouldn't be
part of the serialized data? Java has an extra keyword attribute like
"transient" (comes from before attributes were introduced). C# uses what
we call annotation in this thread. How would you do this in D?
I agree that there doesn't seem to be a nice way at present. One
possibility would be to establish a naming convention for transient
fields -- a Ruby-style solution, I guess.
But are annotations actually an ideal solution for this problem?
Presumably, you'll have to specify that somewhere else anyway. I mean,
during reading it will need to either be initialized separately after
serialisation (like opPostBlit, perhaps?), or else remain uninitialized.
Serialisation seems to be _extremely_ similar to construction. I'm not
sure that annotations capture that.
D has much more powerful metaprogramming than C# or Java, so my
intuition and hope is that we shouldn't need to adopt hacks from those
weaker languages. The annotation syntax in C# and Java looks like an
ugly hack to me. Purely a subjective opinion, of course, but it seems
really out of place in a C-family language.
