• bearophile (11/11) Apr 05 2010 I am not the only one to ask for small breaking changes that have the pu...
• anonymous troll (2/3) Apr 05 2010 But Trap Oriented Programming produces the TOP coders =)
• bearophile (4/4) Apr 06 2010 While my original gut feeling was that Steven Schveighoffer is right abo...
• bearophile (6/6) Apr 11 2010 Thinking some more about Bug 4070 I can add:

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

I am not the only one to ask for small breaking changes that have the purpose
of tidying up the language! :-)

Days ago I was thinking about a possible new enhancement request, but  Simen
Kjaeraas and Steven Schveighoffer have written it before me.

The meat of this enhancement request is simple: it asks to turn the placing of
const/immutable of class/struct/union methods on the left into syntax errors
(there are other alternatives, but this can be the best). See the bug report
4068 and 4070 for more details.

I strongly suggest Walter and Andrei to take a better look at similar tiny
proposals to tidy up the language (some of such proposals are wrong, of
course), because it's good and dandy to disallow in D valid C code like:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++);

Because that's often a bug, and require:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {}

Walter is an expert of writing C code, so he has designed D to avoid such C
traps. But D introduces *many* other constructs and features missing in C, and
they too can contain traps. So it's much better to design D to avoid them too.
Otherwise for each C trap that D avoids, D can introduce two or three new traps
:-)

I'll keep banging on this point in my future posts because this is one of the
most important things for D, more important for example that making D go well
with concurrency. Because D must be safe&tidy first of all for basic serial
code :-) There's no hope of writing reliable concurrent code if basic
constructs have traps or their design has small holes. Not every little hole
can be fixed, but we can try to fix as many of then as possible.

Bye,
bearophile

anonymous troll <troll technolo.gy> writes:

bearophile Wrote:

 Walter is an expert of writing C code, so he has designed D to avoid such C
traps. But D introduces *many* other constructs and features missing in C, and
they too can contain traps. So it's much better to design D to avoid them too.
Otherwise for each C trap that D avoids, D can introduce two or three new traps
:-)

But Trap Oriented Programming produces the TOP coders =)

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

While my original gut feeling was that Steven Schveighoffer is right about bug
4070, I can't really know what the best design solution is, Walter has lot of
programming experience so Steven can be wrong (but in my D2 programs I'll
always put the const/immutable on the right of the function, and I think Andrei
usually does the same).

The main point of my post was that there are few tiny things like this one that
deserve a short discussion. So thank you Walter for taking a look at this
issue, regardless what the final decision is.

Bye,
bearophile

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Thinking some more about Bug 4070 I can add:

A possible piece of the Zen of D language: Special cases in the language are
bad, but sometimes they can be acceptable if they turn a consistent behaviour
that can lead to mistakes/bugs into a good compile-time error.

An example of this is disallowing: for(int i;i<10;i++);
Eventually we can collect a short D Zen.

Bye,
bearophile