On Wednesday, 22 June 2016 at 15:39:11 UTC, Meta wrote:
If it is called with 0 arguments it will return null.
No it will return empty string.
This behaviour has caused several bugs in my code because
combined with optional parens and UFCS, it is easy to
accidentally
call text with 0 args but have it look like passing a variable
to a function. An example bug that I recently found in my code:
This is a problem with optional (), not text.
test takes n parameters and return a string representation of
these parameters. returning an empty string when no parameters is
provided is very much expected.
The alternative is to add special case. And here you get into the
bad design land. When some bad design is introduced it causes
problems. Now there is the option to introduce more and more bad
design to work around the original bad design, or adopt a
principled approach. I'd rather go for #2 . if I wanted #1, I'd
be using C++ or PHP, which both fit that spot better than D.
When the solution to a problem is adding more special casing, you
can be sure you are not moving in the right direction.
