In the D.learn nesgroup Heywood Floyd has started a short thread about 2D arrays definition, he finds them confusing, and he currently wants to use the int marr[3][5]; syntax.
It's not good to have two different syntaxes to define arrays in a language, but I too have found the C-style syntax useful when I have translated some C code to D (later I have replaced the C definitions with D ones). Recently I have suggested a compilation switch like: -cstyle designed to help porting of C code to D that warns against: - usage of global floating point variables/arrays that in some C programs are used with not initialization, assuming they are set to zero (while D initializes them to NaN), this has caused a slow to find bug in one of my programs; - A warning against the usage of large fixed-sized arrays, that are passed around by reference in C and by value in D, so if they are large the program can get slower in D. (I think D already guards against some C-style arrays usages that exploit the reference nature of array arguments). To those two purposes of the -cstyle compiler switch a third can be added: to allow the C-style array definition syntax. So unless -cstyle is used then int marr[3][5]; is a syntax error. This allows to keep the purpose of C-style array definitions (for porting from C code) while essentially making it deprecated for normal D programs. Bye, bearophile
