On Thursday, 3 December 2015 at 14:24:52 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 12/03/2015 06:13 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
You said that "at the end of the day there's documentation". I
would
argue that at least in this case, it may not be enough.
Consider, for
example, a hypothetical user type "Pack", which takes a
tuple/struct and
automatically arranges the fields into a struct such that
space is used
optimally (e.g. all bools are clumped together into a
bitfield, enums
are only given as much bits as their .max needs, etc.). Pack
only needs
to know one property of each field: how many bits it really
needs, and
as such, it might elect to be agnostic of what a pointer is.
If it uses
std.bitmanip.bitfields as its backend, it will happily pack a
pointer at
its user's request, and the user will never see the pointer
warning in
Pack's documentation. And yes, although it's easy to point the
finger at
users and say "ha ha, it's your own fault, you did not RTFM",
I think we
should strive for better than that.
I understand how you feel but I really don't know what else to
do, which makes the entire discussion somewhat theoretical.
Doesn't matter as long as it's explicitly opt-in, and there's
more than one way to do that. Template parameter flag, an
alternative declaration such as unsafeBitfield, disallowing
pointers but allowing a shallow wrapper around them
("UnmanagedPtr" OSLT), etc.
