On Tuesday, 2 February 2016 at 14:36:05 UTC, Bambi wrote:
1. const isn't constant
The idea was to ease porting C code to D, so many things work the
same in C and D except for maybe integer types that were borrowed
from java.
The example snippet ' immutable(int[]) bar() immutable {} '
brings back bad memories of redundant declarations of the style
' Object object = new Object(); '.
Redundancy is not all that bad, but if you want less of it, you
can: `auto bar() immutable {}` - the compiler will infer the
return type.
2. when is an extern an extern?
The wiki page on interfacing with C states that C globals
require an extra extern.
extern attribute is optimized for binding extern functions, which
is what you need most of the time. In C you would need two
attributes `extern cdecl` - one for extern and one for calling
convention, in D it's done with one attribute, though it only
specifies calling convention, because everything is implicitly
extern anyway. It works well for functions, but not for
variables, when you can't differentiate between declaration and
definition.
3. typeof is an operator, sizeof is a property
sizeof is a property because it can work that way, and making it
a whole special syntactical construct for this single purpose
would be overkill. Now it can be implemented as a template, but
it wasn't always this way.
