On Monday, 27 August 2012 at 14:53:24 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 8/27/12 7:34 AM, Manu wrote:
On 27 August 2012 17:03, foobar <f...@bar.com
<mailto:f...@bar.com>> wrote:
This discussion is all sorts of wrong. Whoever said that
defargs are
metadata (Manu?) was right. Therefore it would make sense to
implement a general metadata facility for D and use *that*
for
defargs. C++11 has annotations, so that's the place to
start looking
at. D has already enough of those pesky special case
features, let's
not add yet another one at the expense of a more general
metadata/annotation mechanism which eventually would be
added anyway
due to popular demand.
Yes, I suggested this as a possibility above, but nobody
commented. It
seems like it might solve 2 problems with one stone ;)
Whilst I agree a metadata facility is an interesting topic to
look into, I think default arguments for functions is a poor
motivating example.
Andrei
The point was that there are _other_ motivating examples for
annotations hence there's already popular demand for it. Which is
why it's worth the added complexity to the language. In fact part
of that complexity *already* exists in D syntax via built-in
annotations (e.g @safe).
This same feature (annotations) can be leveraged to solve this
small corner case hence it shouldn't be implemented separately
and complicate both D and DMD for little gain.
