What's the secret to static class members

[Guido via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 29 June 2016 at 15:40:57 UTC, Andrea Fontana wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 June 2016 at 15:33:58 UTC, Guido wrote:
>> The problem is actually much more profound. The classes need 
>> to be declared outside the main() scope. WTF?!?!?!
>>
>> I put them in main() so they would be in scope. This seems 
>> like a *MAJOR* design flaw with the language, not to mention 
>> the compiler not giving useful feedback. This decision, if it 
>> is a decision, makes no sense given all the attention to 
>> scoping rules.
>>
>> I'm not interested in trading one set of bad language 
>> decisions for another. Can someone fix this?
>
> I wonder which language you usually use in your programming 
> experience.

C++

I have all this business generally working in C++. I just wanted 
to try D for a production level quick project. So, the language 
is not ready. I'm really sad about this. I had hoped that I could 
get some useful work done. C++ is painfully slow to write & 
debug, but what can you do.

As I said, why exchange one set of bad design decisions for 
another?

On another topic, tuples seem to have a major problem as well.

Tuple!(float, float, float) test;
Tuple!(float, float, float) [] array_data;

test[0] = 1.0;  // works
array_data[i][0] = 1.0; // doesn't work. Compile-time error, 
probably because the language itself doesn't have a dedicated 
extension for tuple elements that is distinguished from array 
dereferencing. This is the logical extension of how to access 
tuples. I normally use structs in C++, but since pointer 
arithmetic is really frowned upon in D, I decided to use Tuples. 
A mistake, I supposed.

So, I've spent a huge amount of time getting ready to write in D. 
That's all wasted. I'll check back in another 10 years to see if 
your hobby language is still around. In the mean time, try to 
think about improving the compiler error messages. I can write 
code any way the language demands, but it has to make sense and I 
can't be doing a research project on the language every 10 
minutes to figure out the right incantation. I already have that 
with C++.

Bye