dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org)'s article2. After thinking about this some more, the big issue I see is ref opIndex. We can either: a. Disallow it for both UniqueArray and ArrayBuilder. b. Allow it for both UniqueArray and ArrayBuilder and accept that a sufficiently dumb programmer can invalidate the guarantees of UniqueArray by taking the address of one of the elements and saving it somewhere. Probably a bad idea, since assumeUnique() already works for the careful programmer, and UniqueArray is supposed to provide ironclad guarantees. c. Don't define opIndex in the abstract base class at all, thus making Array almost useless as an abstract base class.Welcome to my demons :o). One possibility that I thought of for a long time would be to disallow taking the address of a ref. That reduces the scope of the problem but doesn't eliminate it: void main() { auto a = new UniqueArray(10); fun(a[0], a); } void fun(ref int a, UniqueArray b) { auto imm = b.toImmutable(); // here a is a mutable alias into an immutable array!!! } So that doesn't work, but I thought I'd mention it :o). Another possibility is to expose opIndex to return by value and also opIndexAssign that sets the value. That would be a no-no in C++ because copying is arbitrarily expensive, but I have a feeling that in D it is sensible to consider and foster that all objects should be defined to be cheap to copy (e.g. refcounting, COW etc.) If we go by the notion that in D we can always assume copy costs are reasonable, this last possibility would work. With the newfangled operators, it would even work beautifully because you can do all sorts of things like a[1] += 4 without ever exposing a ref to the user. AndreiI wonder if it would be feasible to allow overloading on ref vs. non-ref return. Technically this would be overloading on return type, but without many of the practical problems. If the return value is used as an lvalue, the ref return function gets called. If the return value is only used as an rvalue, the non-ref function gets called. This would allow return by value to be defined in the base class and return by reference to only be defined in ArrayBuilder.
It has been discussed. Overloading is not necessary - Walter said defining opIndex and opIndexLvalue and having the compiler call the appropriate one is possible.
Andrei
