Remove complex and imaginary types?

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
> 
>>> The remaining advantage is that of imaginary literals, i.e. the i 
>>> postfix:
>>>
>>>     3 + 5i
>>
>> I'd really like to reserve the above phrase to be reserved to mean an 
>> imaginary number. If one has the library delivered right with the 
>> standard compiler or if one has to walk around the Globe in search of 
>> the One library that actually implements it, I'd still want to have 
>> this particular notation reserved (in the Language Grammar itself) for 
>> this particular purpose.
> 
> I do too. And been thinking along the lines of simply putting a hack in 
> that the postfix 'i' means that it's a literal of type 'imaginary', and 
> the compiler looks to see if "std.complex" was imported.
> 
> This isn't as outlandish as it sounds, as there's precedent for it both 
> in C++ <typeinfo> and java.lang.String, as well as D's Object.

I thought the standard library's inclusion in the language spec was one 
of the things you disliked about C++.  Though you're right there is 
effective precedent for it, with the compiler recognizing std.intrinsic 
and various parts of std.math as a QOI feature.  However, this has 
proven to be quite a headache for libraries with alternate path schemes, 
like Tango.  I'll admit to also being a bit concerned that this may 
produce another binding between the runtime and standard library, much 
like the regex features did.  I'm all for retaining imaginary literals, 
but I hope the solution is carefully considered.


Sean