• Random D user (20/20) Mar 11 2017 int*[] foo;
• ketmar (2/3) Mar 11 2017 due to automatic pointer dereferencing that `.` does. no, not a bug.
• Random D user (24/28) Mar 11 2017 Ah... right. Silly me. Of course, since string is actually

Random D user <no email.com> writes:

int*[] foo;
foo.length = 5;

import std.c.string;
int* baz = cast(string*)malloc(50);

import std.c.stdio;
printf("%d %d", foo.length, baz.length );

prints:
Error: no property 'length' for type 'int*'

BUT:

string*[] foo;
foo.length = 5;

import std.c.string;
string* baz = cast(string*)malloc(50);

import std.c.stdio;
printf("%d %d", foo.length, baz.length );

compiles and prints:
5 -842150451

How come string* suddenly has a .length property?
Anyway the result is garbage, so I think this must be a bug.

DMD32 D Compiler v2.073.2

ketmar <ketmar ketmar.no-ip.org> writes:

Random D user wrote:

 How come string* suddenly has a .length property?

due to automatic pointer dereferencing that `.` does. no, not a bug.

Random D user <no email.com> writes:

On Sunday, 12 March 2017 at 01:55:20 UTC, ketmar wrote:
 Random D user wrote:

 How come string* suddenly has a .length property?

 due to automatic pointer dereferencing that `.` does. no, not a 
 bug.

Ah... right. Silly me. Of course, since string is actually 
immutable(char)[].
That's bit of a nasty corner case where -> == . isn't that nice. 
Fortunately, it's rare.

Thanks.

This happened to me, when I was packing stuff into SoA layout and 
didn't want to duplicate the length in the struct (implicitly by 
using []). Of course, I forgot to update one place to use the 
shared length.
That is:

length
ptr
ptr
ptr

instead of

ptr
length
ptr
length
ptr
length

Perhaps I should do a SoA layout template that somehow disables 
.length on individual arrays.