On Tuesday, 20 June 2017 at 21:04:16 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On 6/20/17 1:42 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
Here's my counter-proposal: since the sig constraint line uses
parentheses (and yes, I deliberately planted a sig constraint
above just
to make this point), why not go for syntactical symmetry?
I.e., like
this:
int myFunc(Args...)(Args args)
if (Args.length > 2)
in (args[0] != 0)
in (args[1] > 1); // one semicolon to end them all
This is much much better. The verbosity of contracts isn't
really the brace, it's the asserts.
I think it's both, and I think the brace is the only thing that
can be improved upon. How could you justify insisting that
everyone use the built-in asserts for their contracts? If you
can, then okay, and other avenues are worth exploring. Are there
not, however, many reasons to want to use other types of
contracts? That's the main reason I went with my design, because
I thought it was going too far to imply `assert` when people
might want or need to use other things.
This also gives the compiler a better handle on what causes the
thing to fail (better error message).
I'm pretty sure that the reason asserts are so sparse in terms of
error information is due to the fear of slowdown, were they to
contain more information. This tradeoff would be present
regardless of contract syntax.
IMO, this whole proposal doesn't carry enough weight, either
your version or the DIP itself. I would not be in favor.
Current syntax is understandable, and not too verbose IMO.
That's a fair opinion. I wish I had a crystal ball to see how
many more people would use contracts if this DIP were accepted. I
imagine a lot of people will agree with you. I also know that
some people don't [1].
http://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.2288.1494811099.31550.digitalmar...@puremagic.com
