Daniel Gibson wrote:
Am 21.03.2011 00:55, schrieb bearophile:
Among the things I've listed about Archetype there's one interesting thing. Class instances aren't PODs, but sometimes I prefer reference semantics and to populate fields in a plain way, expecially for simple classes.

Time ago I and other people have suggested a syntax like (this also to avoid a class of bugs http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3878 ):


class Foo {
   string x;
   int y = 1;
   this(this.x, this.y) {}
}
void main() {
   Foo f3 = new Foo("hello", 10);
}


Yeah, I still like that idea ;)


A simpler solution are classes with automatic constructors:

class Foo {
   string x;
   int y = 1;
}
void main() {
   Foo f1 = new Foo(); // Good
   Foo f2 = new Foo("hello"); // Good
   Foo f3 = new Foo("hello", 10); // Good
}


What kind of problems are caused by this? :-)


You'd have to know the order in that the members are defined in the class (and you may not change the order).
Just imagine
class Foo {
  int bla;
  int baz;
}

new Foo(42, 3); // what is bla, what is baz?

and then you decide "uh I'd prefer to have my class members ordered alphabetically" and *bamm* all you code silently breaks.

having a this(this.bla, this.baz) {} would clearly document which argument in the constructor belongs to which class member and the class members ordering wouldn't matter.

Cheers,
- Daniel

I agree. But unfortunately, the idea is a relatively complicated feature with a lot of special cases. For example, this(this.bla, this.bla){}
and what if the class contains a union and you set multiple members of it?
The whole thing is actually quite messy. It's not _terrible_, but it's far from trivial, and it's more complicated than some far more powerful and useful language features.

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