On Saturday, 25 August 2012 at 21:17:55 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/25/2012 1:06 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
On Saturday, 25 August 2012 at 19:39:47 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 8/25/2012 6:03 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
Okay, so bitfields are rarely used, but many templates
involve some use of CTFE,
and templates are very common in D code. It's good that D's
parser is fairly
simple to implement (compared to C++ anyway), but to do
automated refactoring
you need simple semantic analysis, and this is something
that D does not have.
How many IDEs can handle the C preprocessor, with token
pasting and all, when
refactoring?
Straw man - I didn't suggest that the C preprocessor was any
better. C++ is
similarly criticised for its poor IDE support (when compared
with C# and Java)
due to the pre-processor and templates. If you haven't seen
the level of support
that (for example) Visual Studio provides for C# then I
recommend checking it
out. I imagine the situation with Java and Eclipse is similar,
but I don't have
any experience there.
I don't agree it's a straw man - it's the point. A perfect job
is not necessary in order for people to find automated
refactoring useful.
I'm not sure how your previous comment supports that point.
C (and C++) don't do a perfect job, but as I said, they are
similarly criticised for their poor IDE support.
I do agree with you: the tools don't need to do a perfect job,
but I worry if they'll even be able to do a reasonable job.
Templates, CTFE, mixins, etc. are all rampant in D, so I worry
about the amount of work required for tool-developers to support
a respectable subset of D that will stand up to criticism from
the C#/Java folks.
