On Friday, 5 October 2012 at 12:01:30 UTC, Piotr Szturmaj wrote:
Java and C# with their generics can do the following:
class List { }
class List<T> { }
List list = new List();
List<int> intList = new List<int>();
In D similar code can't work because we can't have both a type
and a template with the same name. So this code must be
rewritten to:
class List(T = Variant) { }
List!() list = new List!();
List!int intList = new List!int;
When template name is used as a type and it can be instantiated
with no parameters it could be automatically rewritten to
List!() by the compiler. That code would then look like this:
List list = new List;
List!int intList = new List!int;
The question is... is it possible to change D's behaviour to
avoid awkward !() template parameters _without_ breaking
backward compatibility?
+1 This is natural.
Plus, this has other uses I've mentioned on here in the past,
"sub-scoping":
class Foo
{
int bar;
template baz
{
int bar;
}
}
void main()
{
auto f = new Foo();
f.bar = 0;
f.baz.bar = 1;
}
Currently, this syntax is possible, but requires to some ugly
work-arounds.
