Public outcry against new .init behaviour

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Report it as a bug/regression? It certainly shouldn't have been changed in
the 1.x branch (since stability is the point of a branch in the first
place), and neither in the 2.x branch without providing an easy upgrade
path for those needing the old behaviour.

Deewiant wrote:

> With pre-1.017/2.001 .init:
> 
> typedef int foo = 1;
> foo x = 3; // x.init is 3
> foo y;     // y.init is 1
> 
> With new .init:
> 
> foo x = 3; // x.init is 1
> foo y;     // y.init is 1
> 
> My question is, why? The only argument I've heard is consistency, such
> that foo.property == typeof(foo).property, as in:
> 
> struct S { static int x; }
> S s; // s.x == S.x, &s.x == &S.x
> 
> Yet there's no such consistency in place regardless of .init, and I really
> don't understand this argument. What if x isn't static? S.x becomes an
> error. Consistency lost!
> 
> The only way I can understand the above is that it's considered
> problematic that .init is one of two properties which are valid for both a
> variable and its type, and may give different results for each. If this is
> really that bad, consider creating a new property, and make .stringof
> behave the same way. (Also, the documentation at
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/property.html still refers to the old .init
> behaviour.)
> 
> There are significant arguments for the old behaviour of .init. The
> primary use, in my experience, is to initialize variables to invalid
> values, and then one can simply compare to .init to see if the variable
> has become valid. It's similar to how static arrays simplify the C idiom:
> 
> #define FOO_LENGTH 3
> int[FOO_LENGTH] foo;
> 
> In D, we can just write int[3] foo and use foo.length. However, with the
> new .init, we're forced to use similar code:
> 
> typedef int foo = 1;
> invariant foo X_INIT = 3; // "const" instead of "invariant" for D 1.0
> foo x = X_INIT;
> 
> As opposed to what could be just foo x = 3 and x.init.
> 
> It's not deadly - I found 14 instances of such in about 7000 LOC (wc -l),
> and they can be corrected - but it makes code noticeably uglier. This is
> one of those small, simple bits of syntactic sugar which make coding in D
> fun and productive. I want it back.
> 

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
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