Replacing built-in complex? What's this about?

[Don]

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> The plan to remove the built-in complex and imaginary types has finally 
> come to my attention.  I seem to have somehow blinked and missed the 
> discussions earlier this year about it.
> 
> The motives seem to be along the lines of reducing compiler complexity 
> (not sure if any pun has been intended) and freeing up keywords.  But is 
> it really worth it?

The argument for built-in imaginary types is _extremely_ weak. The 
imaginary numbers are not closed under multiplication:

idouble a, b;
auto c = a * b;

c is of type double! This is a horribly nasty thing to have in the core 
language. It introduces so many special cases, and for almost no benefit 
at all. You never want to use imaginary numbers, you _always_ want to 
convert them to reals. The only thing you want, really, is the imaginary 
literal 1i. The ireal, idouble, and ifloat types with their bizarre 
semantics are a hell of a price to pay for that one literal.