• Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight gmail.com> Jun 18 2008
• Walter Bright <newshound1 digitalmars.com> Jun 19 2008

Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight gmail.com> writes:

Walter Bright Wrote:

 Robert Fraser wrote:
 Out of curiosity, why doesn't return type deduction work for all 
 functions (is this panned?). It seems to be possible to do:
 
 auto foo()()
 {
     return 10;
 }
 
 but not:
 
 auto foo()
 {
     return 10;
 }


 Good question!
 
 Because deducing the return type requires semantic analysis, and for 
 functions that introduces the old forward reference chicken-and-egg 
 problem. This doesn't happen with function templates, because semantic 
 analysis of them doesn't happen until later.


(Apologies for the web interface)

Any way to rewrite them as no-parameter templates automatically if possible and
issue a sensible compiler message if they can't be (i.e. a virtual function).

Walter Bright <newshound1 digitalmars.com> writes:

Robert Fraser wrote:
 Any way to rewrite them as no-parameter templates automatically if possible and
 issue a sensible compiler message if they can't be (i.e. a virtual function).


It's not impossible, but there's too much else to do at the moment.