refined sugar (was DMD 0.165 release)

[Walter Bright]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> We could already do "lazy expression eval" in D, using dmd164 delegates;
>>> sans new sugar. So that Lisp ability was already present?
>> Yes. But few to nobody noticed it, and I'll posit that this bit of sugar
>> will expand its use by a couple orders of magnitude.
> <--snip-->
>>> In this specific case, I suspect there needs to be an indication of some
>>> kind, at the call site, to clearly and unambiguously communicate to a
>>> person (and to the compiler) exactly what is going on.
>> There already was (and is) in the form of { return exp; }. It's just not
>> accepted - I can hardly count all the comments I get from people saying
>> D didn't support this capability, and when I point out the { return exp;
>> }, they frown like people do when you tell them broccoli is good for them.
>>
> 
> I keep wondering who you hear all these things from, because the feelings I
> got from staying around the IRC channel, and reading the NG, is that people
> in general is overly excited by the possibilities of the previous lambda
> syntax, and that it was in fact this excitement that prompted the thread on
> whether the frames should be allocated on stack or heap, escape analysis,
> etc.

I am pretty excited myself about the possibilities of delegates, and it 
grows every time there's a simplification in using them. NGs aren't the 
only thing I participate in; around here there's an active community of 
programmers who like to meet and chitchat about programming over coffee 
or beer. I occasionally get invited to a corporation to talk about D and 
listen to what they want and need.

Being able to talk to people in 3D land makes it a lot easier to get a 
feel for what catches peoples' interest, not the least of which is 
they'll say things they'll never be caught dead writing on a NG post <g>.

> Are you sure that such a feature will really cause an onrush if it's
> delivered by an disclaimer?

I'm not sure. But I want to give it a shot.


> And how do you explain that broccoli is the
> _only_ vegetable my son enjoys to eat? ;)

I wouldn't presume to understand that <g>.