• Walter Bright (7/7) Oct 08 2015 These, of course, are C++ operators that are replace with the . operator...
• =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= (10/17) Oct 08 2015 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales pitches from me
• Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= (8/15) Oct 09 2015 Just about all higher languages does this, since the reference
• Atila Neves (7/23) Oct 09 2015 The only case in which the C++ way is right is when there are two
• =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= (8/21) Oct 09 2015 Yeah... Type properties is another example for D: .sizeof and .alignof
• Freddy (2/13) Oct 09 2015 Stole from D? You mean java right?
• Dmitry Olshansky (4/17) Oct 09 2015 There is no value type objects in Java so no. More likely C#.
• Warwick (3/7) Oct 10 2015 Delphi / Object Pascal had it in the mid 90s IIRC. Long before
• Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= (2/11) Oct 10 2015 Simula is the origin, it came about in the 60s.
• Walter Bright (3/6) Oct 10 2015 Since C# was an internal Microsoft project at the time this was
• Idan Arye (13/35) Oct 11 2015 Nope - C# uses -> to access member of a struct referenced by a
• Warwick (7/12) Oct 11 2015 At the risk of sounding like a broken record the Delphi variant
• Idan Arye (3/16) Oct 11 2015 You should have elaborated then. The other guys talked about the
• Warwick (2/15) Oct 11 2015 Sorry I've been on pills to prevent premature elaboration. :-)
• Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= (17/20) Oct 11 2015 BETA is the successor to Simula and it does not distinguish
• Jeremy DeHaan (2/17) Oct 09 2015 Java doesn't have pointers.
• deadalnix (5/23) Oct 09 2015 -_-
• Jeremy DeHaan (3/15) Oct 09 2015 I guess you could argue it that way, but I don't see references
• Jonathan M Davis (11/28) Oct 09 2015 Java references (as well as C# references and D references) are
• jmh530 (3/4) Oct 08 2015 In the binary case, -> and <- are assignment operators in R. But
• ixid (3/12) Oct 09 2015 Too late to change but wouldn't it be better to have one operator
• Jonathan M Davis (14/17) Oct 09 2015 That would defeat the purpose of _Uniform_ Function Call Syntax.
• ixid (3/5) Oct 09 2015 For some reason I'd thought it didn't work when you mixed member
• Jonathan M Davis (10/17) Oct 09 2015 It works fine in general, and if there's a conflict, it's the
• Andrej Mitrovic (3/12) Oct 11 2015 https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15186

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

These, of course, are C++ operators that are replace with the . operator 
in D. But when I translate C++ code to D, sometimes these operators get 
left behind, and sometimes I simply reflexively type them into D code.

The error message coming out of dmd could be better. I suggest 
recognizing -> and :: in the lexer, and saying something like:

    "The '->' operator is not in D, did you mean '.'?"

Anyone want to do a PR for this? (Should be pretty straightforward.)

=?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:

On 10/08/2015 08:41 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 These, of course, are C++ operators that are replace with the . operator
 in D. But when I translate C++ code to D, sometimes these operators get
 left behind, and sometimes I simply reflexively type them into D code.

 The error message coming out of dmd could be better. I suggest
 recognizing -> and :: in the lexer, and saying something like:

     "The '->' operator is not in D, did you mean '.'?"

 Anyone want to do a PR for this? (Should be pretty straightforward.)

Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales pitches from me 
over the years is recently "looking at Go" and liking it very much. He 
came to me today telling me about this awesome Go feature where you just 
type a dot after a pointer and the language is so great that it works! 
You don't need to type (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will never 
admit that they took that feature from D." (There is probably earlier 
precedence but it felt great to say it to my friend. :) )

Ali

Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer and the 
 language is so great that it works! You don't need to type 
 (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will 
 never admit that they took that feature from D." (There is 
 probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to my 
 friend. :) )

Just about all higher languages does this, since the reference 
type does not have members. Simula too.

But this unfortunately breaks down when you add smart-pointers, 
which makes this approach unsound since pointer-type members 
collide with object members.

So C++ actually got this right by requiring explicit 
dereferencing.

Atila Neves <atila.neves gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 12:19:55 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer and the 
 language is so great that it works! You don't need to type 
 (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will 
 never admit that they took that feature from D." (There is 
 probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to my 
 friend. :) )

 Just about all higher languages does this, since the reference 
 type does not have members. Simula too.

 But this unfortunately breaks down when you add smart-pointers, 
 which makes this approach unsound since pointer-type members 
 collide with object members.

 So C++ actually got this right by requiring explicit 
 dereferencing.

The only case in which the C++ way is right is when there are two 
member functions of the same name in the pointed-to object and 
the smart pointer itself since you can disambiguate `ptr->get()` 
from `ptr.get()`.

Atila

=?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:

On 10/09/2015 05:19 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer and the language
 is so great that it works! You don't need to type (*p).member. Isn't
 Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will never
 admit that they took that feature from D." (There is probably earlier
 precedence but it felt great to say it to my friend. :) )

 Just about all higher languages does this, since the reference type does
 not have members. Simula too.

 But this unfortunately breaks down when you add smart-pointers, which
 makes this approach unsound since pointer-type members collide with
 object members.

Yeah... Type properties is another example for D: .sizeof and .alignof 
are not propagated to the pointee and .stringof is not propagated to the 
type of the pointee.

Similarly, for class references, one must remember to use 
__traits(classInstanceSize) and std.traits.classInstanceAlignment. (Yes, 
I notice the inconsistency. ;) )

Ali

Freddy <Hexagonalstar64 gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales pitches 
 from me over the years is recently "looking at Go" and liking 
 it very much. He came to me today telling me about this awesome 
 Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer and the 
 language is so great that it works! You don't need to type 
 (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will 
 never admit that they took that feature from D." (There is 
 probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to my 
 friend. :) )

 Ali

Stole from D? You mean java right?

Dmitry Olshansky <dmitry.olsh gmail.com> writes:

On 09-Oct-2015 21:44, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales pitches from me
 over the years is recently "looking at Go" and liking it very much. He
 came to me today telling me about this awesome Go feature where you
 just type a dot after a pointer and the language is so great that it
 works! You don't need to type (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will never
 admit that they took that feature from D." (There is probably earlier
 precedence but it felt great to say it to my friend. :) )

 Ali

 Stole from D? You mean java right?



-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

Warwick <warwick warwick.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
 On 09-Oct-2015 21:44, Freddy wrote:
 Stole from D? You mean java right?



Delphi / Object Pascal had it in the mid 90s IIRC. Long before 

Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= writes:

On Saturday, 10 October 2015 at 22:54:15 UTC, Warwick wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
 wrote:
 On 09-Oct-2015 21:44, Freddy wrote:
 Stole from D? You mean java right?



 Delphi / Object Pascal had it in the mid 90s IIRC. Long before 


Simula is the origin, it came about in the 60s.

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

On 10/9/2015 12:48 PM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
 On 09-Oct-2015 21:44, Freddy wrote:
 Stole from D? You mean java right?




developed for D, no.

Idan Arye <GenericNPC gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
 On 09-Oct-2015 21:44, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales 
 pitches from me
 over the years is recently "looking at Go" and liking it very 
 much. He
 came to me today telling me about this awesome Go feature 
 where you
 just type a dot after a pointer and the language is so great 
 that it
 works! You don't need to type (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards 
 will never
 admit that they took that feature from D." (There is probably 
 earlier
 precedence but it felt great to say it to my friend. :) )

 Ali

 Stole from D? You mean java right?




pointer. See 
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/50sbeks5.aspx

The difference between reference types and pointers is that with 
reference types, THERE ARE NO value varaiables. So it's safe to 
use . instead of -> for accessing member through a reference 
because there is no value type, because there is no such a thing 
as accessing a member of a reference type without dereferencing 


This is the innovation in D(regarding this issue) - that on 
struct types, the same operator is used for BOTH the value type 
and the pointer to it.

Warwick <warwick warwick.com> writes:

On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 09:43:04 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
 wrote:

 This is the innovation in D(regarding this issue) - that on 
 struct types, the same operator is used for BOTH the value type 
 and the pointer to it.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record the Delphi variant 
of Object Pascal started doing that some time around Delphi 4 or 
Delphi 5 IIRC. (So mid to late 90s).

IE. You accessed members with the dot operator whether it was an 
object (like D Delphi's objects are heap based / reference 
semantics), a struct, or a pointer to a struct.

Idan Arye <GenericNPC gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 13:05:41 UTC, Warwick wrote:
 On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 09:43:04 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
 wrote:

 This is the innovation in D(regarding this issue) - that on 
 struct types, the same operator is used for BOTH the value 
 type and the pointer to it.

 At the risk of sounding like a broken record the Delphi variant 
 of Object Pascal started doing that some time around Delphi 4 
 or Delphi 5 IIRC. (So mid to late 90s).

 IE. You accessed members with the dot operator whether it was 
 an object (like D Delphi's objects are heap based / reference 
 semantics), a struct, or a pointer to a struct.

You should have elaborated then. The other guys talked about the 
invention of reference types, so I assumed you did as well.

Warwick <warwick warwick.com> writes:

On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 13:50:18 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
 On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 13:05:41 UTC, Warwick wrote:
 On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 09:43:04 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:48:39 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
 wrote:

 At the risk of sounding like a broken record the Delphi 
 variant of Object Pascal started doing that some time around 
 Delphi 4 or Delphi 5 IIRC. (So mid to late 90s).

 IE. You accessed members with the dot operator whether it was 
 an object (like D Delphi's objects are heap based / reference 
 semantics), a struct, or a pointer to a struct.

 You should have elaborated then. The other guys talked about 
 the invention of reference types, so I assumed you did as well.

Sorry I've been on pills to prevent premature elaboration. :-)

Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= writes:

On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 09:43:04 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
 This is the innovation in D(regarding this issue) - that on 
 struct types, the same operator is used for BOTH the value type 
 and the pointer to it.

BETA is the successor to Simula and it does not distinguish 
between value or reference and only use dot reference. What they 
do instead of having a dereference operator is to have a 
"reference operator" and also a "pattern operator" for type 
variables. So it works something like this:

Call a and send the output as the input to b and then store the 
result:

     (1,(2,3)) -> a -> b -> (c,(d,e))

Assign reference a to b (instanced class/function)

     a[] -> b[]

Replace class-type variable a with class-type b (not instanced, 
which is equivalent to a class-type/function pointer)



It makes a lot of sense for an OO language since we usually use 
the referenced content more often than we want to change the 
pointer.

Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 18:44:50 UTC, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales pitches 
 from me over the years is recently "looking at Go" and liking 
 it very much. He came to me today telling me about this 
 awesome Go feature where you just type a dot after a pointer 
 and the language is so great that it works! You don't need to 
 type (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards will 
 never admit that they took that feature from D." (There is 
 probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to my 
 friend. :) )

 Ali

 Stole from D? You mean java right?

Java doesn't have pointers.

deadalnix <deadalnix gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:54:19 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 18:44:50 UTC, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 Semi-relatedly, a colleague who has heard many D sales 
 pitches from me over the years is recently "looking at Go" 
 and liking it very much. He came to me today telling me about 
 this awesome Go feature where you just type a dot after a 
 pointer and the language is so great that it works! You don't 
 need to type (*p).member. Isn't Go awesome!

 I responded "yep, it's a great feature and those gostards 
 will never admit that they took that feature from D." (There 
 is probably earlier precedence but it felt great to say it to 
 my friend. :) )

 Ali

 Stole from D? You mean java right?

 Java doesn't have pointers.

-_-

Yeah reference are definitively not pointer. No they aren't. No I 
told you they aren't. Nope. Not even a little ! No way ! That's 
not true ! I told you that's not true. Nope !

Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 21:21:10 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:54:19 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 18:44:50 UTC, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 [...]

 Stole from D? You mean java right?

 Java doesn't have pointers.

 -_-

 Yeah reference are definitively not pointer. No they aren't. No 
 I told you they aren't. Nope. Not even a little ! No way ! 
 That's not true ! I told you that's not true. Nope !

I guess you could argue it that way, but I don't see references 
and pointers as the same. Similar, yes, but not the same.

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg gmx.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 23:57:28 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 21:21:10 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 19:54:19 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 18:44:50 UTC, Freddy wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 04:15:42 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
 [...]

 Stole from D? You mean java right?

 Java doesn't have pointers.

 -_-

 Yeah reference are definitively not pointer. No they aren't. 
 No I told you they aren't. Nope. Not even a little ! No way ! 
 That's not true ! I told you that's not true. Nope !

 I guess you could argue it that way, but I don't see references 
 and pointers as the same. Similar, yes, but not the same.


managed pointers. Their only real differences from "normal" 
pointers are that they're managed by the GC, you can't assign an 
address to them (except by assigning another reference to them), 
and that you can't dereference them except when accessing one of 
their members. There's no question that per the computer science 
definition of a pointer, they qualify. They just aren't quite 
what you get in C/C++ or from D's pointers which aren't class 
references.


- Jonathan M Davis

jmh530 <john.michael.hall gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 03:41:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
    "The '->' operator is not in D, did you mean '.'?"

In the binary case, -> and <- are assignment operators in R. But 
I imagine you don't want to go crazy with these sorts of messages.

ixid <adamsibson hotmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 03:41:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
 These, of course, are C++ operators that are replace with the . 
 operator in D. But when I translate C++ code to D, sometimes 
 these operators get left behind, and sometimes I simply 
 reflexively type them into D code.

 The error message coming out of dmd could be better. I suggest 
 recognizing -> and :: in the lexer, and saying something like:

    "The '->' operator is not in D, did you mean '.'?"

 Anyone want to do a PR for this? (Should be pretty 
 straightforward.)

Too late to change but wouldn't it be better to have one operator 
for members and another for UFCS? '->' would be good for UFCS.

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg gmx.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 10:03:18 UTC, ixid wrote:
 Too late to change but wouldn't it be better to have one 
 operator for members and another for UFCS? '->' would be good 
 for UFCS.

That would defeat the purpose of _Uniform_ Function Call Syntax. 
The whole point is that it uses the same syntax for member 
functions and free functions. In many cases, it's just for 
aesthetic purposes, but with templated code, it can be critical, 
because it allows you to effectively overload a free function 
with a member function (e.g. a particular range type could 
overload find if it had a more efficient implementation for it 
than the one in std.algorithm). It also makes it so that a type 
which doesn't have member functions can work in a template that's 
expecting the type to have specific member functions (e.g. arrays 
use free functions for the range primitives, but they're normally 
used as if they were member functions).

- Jonathan M Davis

ixid <adamsibson hotmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 10:15:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 That would defeat the purpose of _Uniform_ Function Call 
 Syntax...

For some reason I'd thought it didn't work when you mixed member 
function calls with function calls but it seems to do so smoothly.

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg gmx.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 10:42:03 UTC, ixid wrote:
 On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 10:15:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
 wrote:
 That would defeat the purpose of _Uniform_ Function Call 
 Syntax...

 For some reason I'd thought it didn't work when you mixed 
 member function calls with function calls but it seems to do so 
 smoothly.

It works fine in general, and if there's a conflict, it's the 
member function that gets called. So, if you want to guarantee 
that it's a particular free function that gets called, you need 
to not use UFCS (and possibly provide the full import path when 
using it). But in most cases, it's desirable for a member 
function to be able able to override the behavior of a free 
function. The main problem is when they happen to match but do 
completely different things.

- Jonathan M Davis

Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 9 October 2015 at 03:41:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
 These, of course, are C++ operators that are replace with the . 
 operator in D. But when I translate C++ code to D, sometimes 
 these operators get left behind, and sometimes I simply 
 reflexively type them into D code.

 The error message coming out of dmd could be better. I suggest 
 recognizing -> and :: in the lexer, and saying something like:

    "The '->' operator is not in D, did you mean '.'?"

 Anyone want to do a PR for this? (Should be pretty 
 straightforward.)

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15186
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/5190