On Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:09:02 -0800, Peter Alexander
<peter.alexander...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26/12/11 5:25 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
(a) All interaction with the held object is done via opDispatch. In fact
opDispatch can be engineered to statically enforce no reference to the
held object escapes.
I have a separate, but very much related concern:
If the held object has a method with the same name as RefCounted (e.g.
asConst) then how do you call the held object's method instead of
RefCounted's method?
You, can't. Looking at the source code asConst is a private member function and
therefore, given we are using opDispatch for forwarding, these methods should
have _ or __ prepended onto them.
I've always felt very suspicious of opDispatch. It seems like exactly
the kind of thing that seems good when you look at simple cases, but
would cause subtle problems when used in conjunction with other D
features (e.g. UFCS).
I'm not yet convinced that opDispatch has been thoroughly explored
enough to be used in such a fundamental part of the standard library.
There are several uses for opDispatch. For example, vector swizzling is an
example of using opDispatch to replace a finite set of related functions.
General forwarding, like alias this, requires a minimalistic design: the public
interface should be as small as reasonable and the private functions should
never use a 'good' function name.
