On Monday, 3 September 2012 at 22:38:28 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Tuesday, September 04, 2012 00:21:53 Carl Sturtivant wrote:
---same thing (specialized to struct S) in my first reply.
I'm just fishing, seeking a boundary.
There is a cleanness issue to discuss. It would be nice to know
what you think about implicit conversion from 'S*' to 'ref S'
(and not the other way as someone seemed to be suggesting).
Pointers and ref are two entirely different things and
shouldn't be treated the
same. If you want to pass the pointer to ref S, then
dereference it. Any and
all implicit conversions should be treated with care. D has far
fewer than
C/C++ specifically because they're a major source of bugs.
It's hard for a newish outsider to get a sense of where the
boundaries
lie.
We're trying _not_ to add new features. D is supposed to be
stabilizing. The
language definition is essentially frozen. We pretty much only
add features
when we really need to. Any and all new language features need
to solve a real
problem and need to carry their weight. If anything, the trend
is to _remove_
features from the language and move them into the library
rather than add them
to the language (e.g. scope on local variables being axed in
favor of
std.typecons.Scoped). You need a _really_ good reason for a new
language
feature, or it's not going to happen.
Pretty much the only feature that was added at all recently
which had anything
to do with syntactic niceties was UFCS, and that was extension
of an existing
feature with arrays, long sought-after, and depending on how
you read TDPL, it
implied that the feature was in the language. So, it got added.
But in
general, something that's trying to adjust syntax isn't going
to happen,
because that's a matter of aesthetics.
_Always_ look to solve the problem within the language first.
If you can, then
it's _highly_ unlikely that your problem merits a new language
feature.
- Jonathan M Davis
Thank you for your frankness. The above being the case, I wonder
why p.frog where p is a pointer has been made to work when a
wrapper will do the job. Is that something that might best be
removed? It is after all an aesthetic matter.
