Blog post: What D got wrong

[Neia Neutuladh]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 17:28:01 +0000, Vijay Nayar wrote:
> Could you please elaborate a little bit more on this?  In the linked
> program, I had expected that "ref" would return a reference to "a" that
> would behave similar to a pointer.

They work like pointers that automatically dereference when assigning to 
the base type.

Only three things in D can be ref:
* A function parameter
* A function return value
* A foreach variable (since that's either going to be a function return 
value, a function parameter, or a pointer, depending on what you're 
iterating over)

So when the compiler sees something like:

    ref int foo();
    auto a = foo();

It sees that the type of 'a' has to be the same as the return type of 
'foo'. Except that's not possible, so it uses the nearest equivalent type: 
int.

And if you have:

    ref int foo();
    int a = foo();

That obviously converts by copying the value.