Re: Does D have too many features?

[F i L]

Peter Alexander wrote:
- opDispatch
  This is useful and of significant value if used the right 
way.

Can you give me an example of it being used the right way?

It can be very useful for jQuery/JSON style dynamic objects:

    import std.variant, std.stdio;

    struct Dynamic {
        Variant[string] vars;

        void opDispatch(string key)() @property {
            return vars[key];
        }

        void opDispatch(string key, T)(T value) @property {
            vars[key] = value;
        }
    }

    void main() {
        auto foo = Dynamic();

        foo.a = "A";
        foo.b = 11;

        writefln("%s, %s", foo.a, foo.b);
    }


  I hope you are not actually serious about that '->' part.

I'm serious. I don't like overloaded syntax.  foo.bar shouldn't 
also mean (*foo).bar -- it causes confusion and introduces 
ambiguities when either could work. Combine this with 
opDispatch, UFCS and function overloading and your in for some 
nasty headaches.

Craziness. What could you possibly gain is there in forcing a 
pointer distinction at every point that it's used? We already 
declared the variable as a pointer, we don't need to be reminded 
of that fact at every line.