dmd 1.053 and 2.037 release

[Don]

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> bearophile wrote:
>> 5 ^^ 2 doesn't work yet, I guess it's not implemented yet.
>> But what do I have to import from math to use 5.2 ^^ 2 ?
>> Anyway, the need to explicitly import something to use a built-in 
>> operator like ^^ looks like a bad idea.
> 
> A very bad idea indeed! The idea is to save keystrokes...
> 
> Can't "import std.math : pow;" be added to the current module when this 
> is needed?

I'll just explain the situation here. I provided a patch to DMD for 
opPow, with ^^. The patch was very minimal, since I did not know if 
Walter would accept it. It's not worth putting a whole lot of effort 
into something which will just be rejected (and it has less chance of 
acceptance if it is complicated). In the end, he did include the patch, 
though without opPowAssign.

I did the absolute bare minimum required to get ^^ working. In my patch, 
I clearly stated that the requirement to include std.math.pow is 
temporary. BTW, One of the nice things about ^^ is that we will finally 
be able to do integer powers without necessarily using floating-point.
All kinds of stuff is still missing. a ^^ b won't be constant-folded, 
for example.
It's desperately important that the language spec becomes stable before 
Andrei's book comes out. That leaves only a couple more releases left in 
D2 where features can be added. Some, like this one, will have rough 
edges. Don't think of it as fully implemented feature.