D should disallow forward references

[Don]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Don, el 26 de agosto a las 09:37 me escribiste:
>> I have a copy of Walter's internal DMD test suite, so I could actually
> 
> What was the reason not to release the test suite? Copyright?

Yes.

> Because Walter has claimed frequently that the submitted patches are not
> well tested. It would be a huge help for people contributing patches to
> have the "official" test suite to be sure their patches would be accepted.

Yes, though you don't need the test suite, just the results. You just 
need to know: "that passed all tests" or "here are test cases which it 
fails".
It still doesn't guarantee that the patch will be accepted, though -- 
Walter may decide the patch fixes the problem at the wrong place.

>> test all of the patches and be 'patchmeister'(I'm currently responsible
>> for more than half the patches, anyway).  Maybe we could have
>> a 'patchdmd' branch in the repository, which I would have write access
>> to, maybe that would make it easier for Walter to incorporate patches
>> (it'd be particularly valuable for DMD1, I think). But the last thing
>> I'd want to do is make a fork of DMD.
> 
> And you know what? Even if you want, you can't (without Walter permission,
> of course)...

Walter's permission is an obvious condition. BTW, that's untrue, anyway: 
the front-end is GPLed, so a patched front-end can certainly be 
redistributed. But it'd just be a service to Walter anyway.

> Then people ask why it's important that DMD is *really* free/libre.

I'm one of those people, and I still don't see how it makes any 
practical difference. The backend is extremely useful for compiler 
development, but it's not significant in the long-term development of 
the language. I don't think a 32-bit only backend will be very valuable 
in 5-10 years time.