bool (was DConf 2019 AGM Livestream)

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 07:16:04AM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 5/12/19 11:46 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 01:20:16PM +0000, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> > [...]
> > > If anyone's looking for a challenge, I welcome them to propose a
> > > new `Bool` type (note the capital B) for inclusion in my new
> > > library.
> > [...]
> > 
> > As long as && and || continue to evaluate to a 1-bit integer, all
> > library efforts to implement Bool will be futile.
> 
> When writing std.typecons.Ternary I thought of overloading opBinary
> for | and & to take a lazy argument on the right. I forgot why I ended
> up not doing it (I think it was because of code generation issues).
> This is something that could be made to work.

The problem is that && and || cannot be overloaded (and for very good
reasons -- it would open the door to C++-style egregious operator
overload abuse), and the alternatives & and | have the wrong precedence,
so you wouldn't be able to write boolean expressions with Bool naturally
the way you could with the built-in bool type. It would not be a drop-in
replacement and you would have to rewrite every single boolean
expression to use Bool instead, and that with a high chance of
introducing subtle errors because of the different precedence of & and
|.

Boolean expressions and the associated boolean type is one of the things
that should be baked into the language (it'd be a mess otherwise), but
that also means that if the language doesn't get it right you have no
recourse.


T

-- 
Too many people have open minds but closed eyes.