• Ben Hinkle (9/9) Nov 19 2003 Can a different word be used instead of "typedef" for D's typedef? I thi...
• Berin Loritsch (17/25) Nov 19 2003 Playing devil's advocate here: Why have both typedef and alias at all?

"Ben Hinkle" <bhinkle4 juno.com> writes:

Can a different word be used instead of "typedef" for D's typedef? I think
it is asking for confusion when "alias" is equivalent to C's typedef (though
I support one can alias more things than just types, right?) and D makes
"typedef" mean something else. Since I speak C/C++ much more often than D I
have the word "typedef" hard-wired in my brain to mean what it has always
meant.
I think it would be easier on us C programmers to either make typedef mean
C's typedef or change the name to not conflict with C's typedef.

-Ben

Berin Loritsch <bloritsch d-haven.org> writes:

Ben Hinkle wrote:

 Can a different word be used instead of "typedef" for D's typedef? I think
 it is asking for confusion when "alias" is equivalent to C's typedef (though
 I support one can alias more things than just types, right?) and D makes
 "typedef" mean something else. Since I speak C/C++ much more often than D I
 have the word "typedef" hard-wired in my brain to mean what it has always
 meant.
 I think it would be easier on us C programmers to either make typedef mean
 C's typedef or change the name to not conflict with C's typedef.

Playing devil's advocate here:  Why have both typedef and alias at all?

Simplify.

Have one word to mean you are making a new type, even if the scope of the
type would be for one class/module.

If you have it as an "alias", it is sufficiently different from C/C++ to
make it known it operates differently.

The alias would be a new type, but the compiler will create automatic conversion
(aka casting) for the original type.

For instance:

alias Rectangle<float> Rect;

would mean that we can do the following:

Rect myRect = (Rect) new Rectangle<float>();

or

Rectangle<float> outsideRect = (Rectangle<float>) new Rect();

That way the types can still be used interchangably, but treated as a strong
type.  Do we really need both a typedef and an alias?  I think it is overkill.