bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
I don't see how it could be called a dirty hack.
Because it's untidy, in the source code it looks like the information of the
default value is located in the function definition, while in truth it is
stored elsewhere. This can be more efficient, but it is not tidy, this
abstraction can leak a lot, you can see it here:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4028 Maybe this too is related:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3430
These are both bugs, and not a design fault in having default arguments.
I presume this part of the D design will not change (even if a solution for
those two bugs need to be found), but a language designer must be able to
tell apart what is done for efficiency (putting the information of the
default arguments at the calling point) and what's the right and tidy thing
to do (putting this information somehow connected to the function itself).
I don't agree that your proposal is necessarily right or tidy. D is a compile
time language, and it would be strange to expect it to behave otherwise.
I also don't see recompilation as a problem, as D compiles at an incredible
speed.
