.NET on a string

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-03-22 05:08:55 -0400, Kagamin <spam at here.lot> said:

> Cristian Vlasceanu Wrote:
> 
>> I passed a proposal of my own to Walter and Andrei, and that is to have D
>> coders explicitly state the intent of using a slice with the "ref" keyword;
>> "ref" is already a legal token in D (at least in 2.0) albeit it is only
>> valid in the context of a parameter list, or foreach argument list. It is
>> not legal to say "ref int j = i;" in a declaration, for example. But it is a
>> trivial change in the parser (I have implemented this change as a proof of
>> concept / language extension research) to allow ref (just for slices): "ref
>> int[] s = a[1..2];" other than in parameter and foreach arg lists.
> 
> There was another suggestion - to mark arrays: int[] is a slice, 
> int[new] is an array.

I like that better, because the less verbose type is a slice and that's 
what you need to pass around most of the time.

But I think it'd be even better (perhaps not for .NET compatibility, 
but for D in general) to just remove the need for having a separate 
array type. For instance, we could have the GC keep track of the array 
bounds in addition to the allocated size, allowing it to determine if 
it can grow a slice in place by checking if the slice points at the 
end. I'm sure someone has already proposed this at some point.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/