On 03/25/2010 09:38 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Andrei Alexandrescu"<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote in message
news:4babc1f7.6080...@erdani.org...
On 03/25/2010 02:52 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
I can agree mixins are a perfectly fine interim solution for anything not
already in the language, and for truly obscure needs (I use them all the
time for both situations myself). But I'd still hardly consider flags and
bitfields (to be clear, I'm talking about the abstract concept of a
bitfield
in general, not necessarily the C-style
struct-with-sub-byte-member-alignment bitfield syntax/semantics) to be an
"obscure" need in something that's supposed to be a systems language. I
guess we just have a fundamental disagreement on that.
In what ways do you find the bitfield interface wanting?
Ignoring frequency-of-usage for the moment, since this is a question of
syntax, compare these two syntaxes of creating a struct:
mixin(struct!("myStruct"
uint, "x",
int, "y",
uint, "z",
bool, "flag"));
Versus the current:
struct myStruct {
uint x;
int y;
uint z;
bool flag;
}
There's just less syntactical noise, and the syntax is designed around the
semantics rather than shoehorning various generic syntaxes to fit the
purpose.
But frequency of usage is essential. This is about bitfields, not
struct. The former are arguably much less used than the latter. And
then, there are many more uses than definitions.
Andrei
