On 11/1/12 6:51 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 11/1/2012 2:20 PM, bearophile wrote:
Some complexity comes from the
desire to do more and more. As example see this recent request from Manu,
What about all your feature requests? I think you've made more than
anyone, by a factor of 10 at least!
:-)
As for Manu's request
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8108
I've gone over with him why he needs it, and there's no other reasonable
way. He needs it for real code in a real application.
I'd argue this actually is part of a category of features that does not
increase the complexity of the language (quite the contrary in fact).
This is because stating that declaration+definition in the same file
won't work takes actually more cognitive load than just allowing it.
By the consistency principle, one should infer unknown parts of a
complex system from knowing the others. Consider then this setup:
* Declarations (without definition) of functions are allowed.
* Definitions are allowed.
* Declarations and definitions are allowed in distinct files in the same
project as long as they match.
At this point, it is more tenuous to argue that "same file" is a special
case that should prevent declarations and definitions to coexist, than
to just let it happen and let the consistency principle take care of
explaining it.
Andrei
