On Tuesday, 30 September 2014 at 13:08:57 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
Semi-tangential to this discussion, but this bit hits on
something I've been thinking for a little while... ref is, at
its core, trying to be a non-nullable pointer. And I get the
strong sense that it's failing at it.
That's a very perceptive observation. :)
So you also get a sense that D could have non-nullable reference
semantics for a ref-type?
And possibly extend it to be assignable as a
const-mutable-reference (pointer) using a dedicated operator or
using the more ugly "&" notation or a cast?
In Simula you had two assignment operators that made the the
ref/value issue visually distinct.
a :- b; //a points to b
x := y; // x is assigned value of y
It is analogue to the "==" vs "is" distinction that many
languages make. I think it makes sense to have that visual
distinction. Makes code easier to browse.
