DMD 0.177 release

[Kirk McDonald]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> "Walter Bright" <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
> news:ele2k9$2hr5$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> 
>>More ABI changes, and implicit [] => * no longer allowed.
>>
>>http://www.digitalmars.com/d/changelog.html
>>
>>http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.175.zip
> 
> 
> No offense, but would it honestly kill you to allow ctors in structs?  We've 
> been using static opCall as a _workaround_ for the lack of struct ctors, and 
> making it part of the language doesn't really seem to be addressing the 
> problem.  That, and it doesn't make any sense that classes use "this()" and 
> structs use "static S opCall()".  We're starting to get into "overloading 
> indexing in C++" territory.
> 
> That, and which would be more efficient?  The static opCall needs to return 
> an instance of the struct on the stack, which could be very inefficient for 
> large structs.  With a true ctor, the struct is passed by reference to the 
> ctor and has its fields set directly.
> 
> And I also can't figure out how to make the implicit opCall work with more 
> than one parameter.  :P
> 
> I'm also a little wary about opAssign.  Not that I don't find it useful, 
> just that you've been vehemently opposed to overloading it in D for how many 
> years, and three weeks before 1.0 you reverse your opinion.  What does that 
> mean?
> 

The thing with opAssign, I realised after reading the spec, is that it 
explicitly doesn't allow copy assignment. This reduces it from the level 
of a powerful feature to a mere toy, or at most a form of implicit casting.

Assigning one struct to another still guarantees a bitwise copy, and 
reference assignment for class instances cannot be stepped on. This 
removes essentially all of the danger that opAssign might have introduced.

> But complaints aside, thanks for removing the []=>* implicit cast and the 
> bugfixes.  Man, this last month has been an exciting time for D :) 
> 
> 


-- 
Kirk McDonald
Pyd: Wrapping Python with D
http://pyd.dsource.org