Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Yigal Chripun" <yigal...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:he6sqe$1dq...@digitalmars.com...
Based on recent discussions on the NG a few features were
deprecated/removed from D, such as typedef and C style struct
initializers.
IMO this cleanup and polish is important and all successful languages do
such cleanup for major releases (Python and Ruby come to mind). I'm glad
to see that D follows in those footsteps instead of accumulating craft
like C++ does.
As part of this trend of cleaning up D before the release of D2, what
other features/craft should be removed/deprecated?
I suggest reverse_foreach and c style function pointers
please add your candidates for removal.
s/reverse_foreach/foreach_reverse/ ;)
1. Floating point literals without digits on *both* sides!!! "1.", ".1" -->
Useless hindrance to future language expansion!
2. Octal literals! I think it'd be great to have a new octal syntax, or even
better, a general any-positive-inter-base syntax. But until that finally
happens, I don't want "010 == 8" preserved. And I don't think the ability to
have an octal literal is important enough that lacking it for a while is a
problem. And if porting-from-C really has to be an issue, then just make
0[0-9_]+ an error for a transitionary period (or forever - it'd at least be
better than maintaining "010 == 8").
3. Also the comma operator, but that's already been recently discussed.
On 1. I understand you mean floating point literals without digits on
both sides of the decimal point should be disallowed. On basis of this
understanding I beg to differ on grounds that this *should* be allowed
for future language expansion.
Rationale: Whilst D is not currently XML aware (to any meaningful level
of standards compliance), the language may go that way in the future.
Therefore I would suggest that the lexical form of all literals in the
language should be aligned with, or at least include the lexical forms
of, literals as allowed by XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/
Specifically this does allow digits to be omitted from either size as
per the following lexical production:
DoubleLiteral ::=
(("." Digits) | (Digits ("." [0-9]*)?)) [eE] [+-]? Digits
It is noted, of course, that D does provide the very programmer-friendly
mechanism of allowing underscores to used to separate digits in integer
literals. Whilst integers with embedded underscores are not included in
the lexical space of integers as in cited XML Schema Datatypes, I do not
argue against them. In other words, whatever D supports with respect to
the lexical forms of literals is fine so long as it *does not* preclude
lexical forms from XML Schema Datatypes.
On 3. I cannot see the comma operator being removed in any short space
of time; this would have the adverse effect of introducing more problems
at this stage and would likely delay D2 even further. There is a
special case usage of comma operator expressions that I would like to
see disallowed and that is in the declaration of array dimensions, a
confusing situation that I have mentioned before.
Recap: What does the following declaration mean?
int[3,4,5] x;
Does this look like a 3 dimensional array declaration in any other
language? Of course it is not though (in D).
Cheers
Justin Johansson
