Get rid of bit and bit[] ?

[Don Clugston]

Walter Bright wrote:
> I think the basic type bit has been a failure. It's a substantial increase 
> in the compiler and runtime complexity to support it. Nobody seems happy 
> about bit being a boolean type. There's no reasonable way to take a pointer 
> to a bit, meaning that out and inout bit parameters are inconsistent and 
> kludgy.
> 
> Should bit and bit[] be removed before 1.0?
> 
> There is a place for bit[] as a library type, though.
> 
> So what do people think? 

Something I didn't see anyone mention is the fact that 'bit' isn't 
really a native CPU type. x86 doesn't have any instructions that operate 
on bits per se, except for the carry flag. Everything else is operations 
on bits within integers. Bits are like quarks: everything is made out of 
them, but you can never see one on its own.
I think D has been pretending that there's such a thing as an isolated 
bit, the same mistake that C++ made with vector<bool>. It's an illusion 
that's too costly to maintain.