Top 5

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Denis Koroskin wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:07:27 +0400, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> 
>> Ok, per Aarti's suggestion: without speaking officially for Walter, 
>> let me ask this - what do you think are the top issues you'd like to 
>> see fixed in D?
>>
>> Andrei
> 
> Oh, I forgot about these:
> 
> - omittable parens - bad feature. I wish a real property syntax existed 
> (with only .foo; allowed, no .foo(); please).

This doesn't have much support from Walter, I'm afraid.

> [Minor|Wish] overlapping array operation. The following should be 
> allowed, even if it makes things slightly slower. Why user should care?
> void foo(T[] t1, T[] t2) {
>     ...
>     t1[] = t2[]; // overlap or not? who knows..
>     t1[0..100] = t1[10..110]; // yes, they do, so what?
>     ...
> }

I think this often indicates an error.

> [Wish] Stack allocation - why allocate on heap when you can allocate on 
> stack?
> 
> void drawString(char[] text) {
>     int length = getLengthAsUtf16String(text); // for leading zero
>     wchar[length + 1] buffer;                  // C++ and C++0x both 
> have this feature
>     convertToUtf16String(text, buffer); buffer[length] = 0;
>     graphics.DrawString(font, color, buffer.ptr);
> }
> 
> Do you write down? :)
> Thanks.

Neither C++ nor C++0x have that feature. C99 does (VLAs). But I do think 
it's a useful feature. In a class I taught that entailed teaching 
students some C, most of them actually tried VLAs naturally without 
knowing about it, gcc accepted it, and they used it to great effect.


Andrei