Declaring Ref Variables Inside Function Calls

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:15 AM, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
> == Quote from Bill Baxter (wbaxter at gmail.com)'s article
>> We're going to vote complex types off the island, right?   Maybe we
>> could get rid of associative arrays as a built-in too.
>
> Aren't builtin complex types on the way out anyhow?

Right.  That's what I meant.  But I feared my tuple for complex
exchange would not be accepted because the demise of complex was
already announced.  So I threw in associative arrays too.

> (See
> http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_complex.html).  I always found them to be
> quite peculiar, as they really only are useful for a niche within a niche.
> Specifically, noone outside scientific computing (already a small subset of
> programmers) would use them, and even then, only a subset of scientific computing
> people need them.  I personally do scientific computing (specifically
> bioinformatics, which for those of you who aren't familiar with the field is
> mostly stochastic models and data mining as applied to molecular biology), and I
> have never in my life used D's complex numbers.
>
> My guess is that Walter, having a mech e. degree, drastically overestimated early
> in D's design how many people actually use complex numbers.  I know enough
> mechanical and electrical engineers and physicists to know that they simply love
> complex numbers.

Walter read a paper by a numerical math guy stating that some things
just can't be done correctly if complex types aren't part of the
language.  And I guess it seemed true at the time.   But since then
they have figured out a way to make the compiler clever enough to
handle such cases correctly even without it being built-in.

--bb