On 29.04.2012 4:31, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Sunday, April 29, 2012 01:54:35 Peter Alexander wrote:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 23:37:14 UTC, F i L wrote:
Peter Alexander wrote:
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.
It matters when you have things that imitate pointers (e.g. smart
pointers). Those will have their own members, separate from the
pointee's members, so ptr.foo could refer to the smart pointer's
members or the pointee's members.
For better or worse, the solution for smart pointers in D would be to use
opDispatch,
*cough* alias this *cough*
but it _does_ still mean that the type pointed to can't have any
of the same functions as the smart pointer (or at least, they would have to be
called differently, since . would use opDispatch and therefore use the smart
pointer's function), so you _do_ lose something over the -> syntax here.
However, the overall gain is usability probably still outweighs that. I
wouldn't exactly have been heartbroken if -> had been in D, but simplicity of
not needing it can be very nice - and it can be invaluable in the case of
templates, because then you don't have to distinguish between structs,
pointers to structs, and classes when calling functions on them.
- Jonathan M Davis
--
Dmitry Olshansky
