DMD 0.177 release [Length in slice expressions]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Fri Dec 22 02:13:31 PST 2006


Pragma wrote:
> b[0 .. $.length];
> a[0 .. $.getIndexOf(';')];
> 
> So in essence, every use of '$' would be a 'nullary' operator - an alias 
> if you will.

This isn't going to be agreeable to most since the purpose of $ in the 
first place was to save typing.

> I'd imagine that extending things in this manner would simplify things 
> grammatically while allowing for a wider category of uses.  However, it 
> doesn't solve the issue that you brought up, and that I've quoted above.
> 
> c[$-1];
> 
> It looks like it should be an implicit cast of the '$' to a size_t 
> (length), via it's use in an expression.  Any thoughts on this?

I'd rather have $ defined everywhere to mean length, which is useful 
outside [] as well.

Andrei

P.S. Maybe there's a misunderstanding? The grammar I sent does not have 
a problem w.r.t. unary vs. nullary; it's just a tad more complicated to 
avoid ambiguity.



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