what was wrong with struct & class in C++?

[James Dennett]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Russell Lewis wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Russell Lewis wrote:
>>>> Hear, hear!  Good arguments, all!  It still doesn't answer why we
>>>> left out the little star on class-reference variable assignments. 
>>>> As I've argued before, the question of syntax is orthogonal to the
>>>> question of legal operations.  Make value-style operations illegal
>>>> for classes, and keep the star there, IMHO.
>>>
>>> It would make writing generic code unnecessarily difficult.
>>
>> ????  I thought that one of the key arguments for putting the syntax
>> back to the C++ way was that it would make generic code easier to
>> write.  Right now, when we perform an assignment, generic code can't
>> know (without specialization) whether it is assigning a value or a
>> reference type.
> 
> Because if I replace a struct with a class, then I have to go through
> every use of the struct and add a *.

That's the *problem* that we have in D today, that this
change of syntax is intended to solve.

The wonderful thing is that you would NOT have to do this
with explicit dereferencing a la C++, but you DO have to
do this if you change a class to a struct with D today
because D lacks uniform ways to access value and reference
types (as dereferencing is implicit in one case and explicit
in the other).  D uses the same syntax to mean utterly
different things depending on context, and that's anathema
to genericity.

Maybe examples are needed if people are talking past each
other this obviously?

-- James