"with" still sucks + removing features + adding features

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

bearophile wrote:
> 2) I'd like Walter to ask people before implement features. People
> here discuss about feature X for a week, that they think it is cool
> (or maybe even useful!), and then weeks later Walter implements
> feature Y that no one was asking for. This is not just wrong, it's
> silly.

To be brutally honest, I think many features discussed here are 
completely missing the point. Only a couple of posts ago, there were 
suggestions for alternate syntaxes for "with" that were not only 
useless, they added new keywords like they were up for grabs. If 
somebody wants to make "as" into a keyword, I'm liable to go postal. 
More to the point, I forgot the exact context, but recently a poster 
wrote a long message describing how he wants simultaneously two 
completely antagonistic features, to finally (and to his credit) 
courageously face the inevitable truth: that he had no idea what he 
really wanted. This is happening a lot in this group, just that most of 
the time it goes undetected.

My perception is that the recently-added features are of good quality.

> 3) In the past I have discussed how Ruby, Chapel
> and other languages solve this problem. A solution is to use a .. #b
> to denote that b is inclusive. You may not like this idea (and I am
> not sure I like it much), but it doesn't look so much worse than case
> a: .. case b:

It looks and is a million times worse. If you know D1 and see

case 'a': .. case 'z':

you pretty sure know exactly what's going on. If you know D1 but haven't 
been illuminated by the likes of Ruby and Chapel and see:

case 'a' .. #'z':

you're like, what the heck were they thinking about when they designed 
this ass-backward syntax?


Andrei