I am not the only one to ask for small breaking changes that have the purpose
of tidying up the language! :-)
Days ago I was thinking about a possible new enhancement request, but Simen
Kjaeraas and Steven Schveighoffer have written it before me.
The meat of this enhancement request is simple: it asks to turn the placing of
const/immutable of class/struct/union methods on the left into syntax errors
(there are other alternatives, but this can be the best). See the bug report
4068 and 4070 for more details.
I strongly suggest Walter and Andrei to take a better look at similar tiny
proposals to tidy up the language (some of such proposals are wrong, of
course), because it's good and dandy to disallow in D valid C code like:
for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++);
Because that's often a bug, and require:
for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {}
Walter is an expert of writing C code, so he has designed D to avoid such C
traps. But D introduces *many* other constructs and features missing in C, and
they too can contain traps. So it's much better to design D to avoid them too.
Otherwise for each C trap that D avoids, D can introduce two or three new traps
:-)
I'll keep banging on this point in my future posts because this is one of the
most important things for D, more important for example that making D go well
with concurrency. Because D must be safe&tidy first of all for basic serial
code :-) There's no hope of writing reliable concurrent code if basic
constructs have traps or their design has small holes. Not every little hole
can be fixed, but we can try to fix as many of then as possible.
Bye,
bearophile
