On Tuesday, 13 July 2010 at 12:39:19 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:48:05 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
We've been discussing simplified interfaces in this group but
couldn't find one that satisfied all use cases.
Consider this:
T* getNext(R, T)(ref R range, ref T item);
Semantics: <snip>
Yes, yes, yes!
-Steve
Oh dear. I can see this is getting ugly, pretty darn fast...
If you need to /pass/ TWO parameters by _reference_ AND return a
pointer to a /templated/ method _just_ to get 1 element out of a
range/array, the design is horribly wrong.
Imagine all the sorts of problems newcomers would have with
learning this.
Not to mention the troubles /everyone/ would have with having
this templated method a class. (How do you override it?)
Really, doing something simple should be simple.
I don't have any brilliant ideas, but one guess would be nullable
types... if you can return a nullable value, your interface for
an interface could just be:
T? next();
and that's it... it would return null if nothing is left. (The
compiler can just set the null flag and ignore initializing the
rest of the struct if the result is null.)
Anyway, whatever we do... _please_ don't make it something like
that suggestion above >_< thanks
