On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:45:01 -0400, dsimcha <dsim...@yahoo.com> wrote:
== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org)'s articleI'm having a hard time justifying that you use new X(args) to create a class object, and X(args) to create a struct object. I wrote this: ============ The syntactic difference between the expression creating a @struct@ object---Test(@\meta{args}@)@---and the expression creating a @class@ object---\cc{new Test(}\meta{args}@)@---may be jarring at first. \dee could have dropped the @new@ keyword entirely, but that @new@ reminds the programmer that an object allocation (i.e., nontrivial work) takes place. =============== I'm unhappy about that explanation because the distinction is indeed very weak. The constructor of a struct could also do unbounded amounts of work, so what gives? I hereby suggest we get rid of new for class object creation. What do you guys think? AndreiAbsolutely. I've thought this for a while but hesitated to bring it up because I felt it was a bikeshed issue. Now that I think of it, though, it would have the substantive benefit of making it easier to switch from structs to classes if you suddenly realize you need polymorphism, or from classes to structs if you suddenly realize you need value semantics. I really can't see any downside other than the loss of static opCall for classes, which doesn't have tons of good use cases anyhow.
As structs mix static opCall and ctors, there's no reason classes can't.
