Short list with things to finish for D2

[Stewart Gordon]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> We're entering the finale of D2 and I want to keep a short list of 
> things that must be done and integrated in the release. It is clearly 
> understood by all of us that there are many things that could and 
> probably should be done.

What do you mean by finale, exactly?

<snip>
> * Encode operators by compile-time strings. For example, instead of the 
> plethora of opAdd, opMul, ..., we'd have this:
> 
> T opBinary(string op)(T rhs) { ... }
> 
> The string is "+", "*", etc. We need to design what happens with 
> read-modify-write operators like "+=" (should they be dispatch to a 
> different function? etc.)
<snip>

Perhaps something like

     T opModify(string op)(T rhs)

so that
     a += b
would be equivalent to the first of these to be valid:
     a = a.opModify!("+")(b)
     a = (a.opModify!("+")(b), a)  (if opModify returns void)
     a = a.opBinary!("+")(b)
     a = b.opBinary!("+")(a)

The idea is that an opModify method would likely modify the object 
in-place and return the modified object, but may return a new object to 
be assigned to a.

That said, I'm not sure if there's any real use case for it being a new 
object distinct from simple a + b.  But maybe there are cases where it 
may variously modify in-place or reallocate.  (Is this still how ~= 
works in current D2?)

But whatever we do, we shouldn't allow opModify to return something if 
that something isn't going to be assigned to a.

Stewart.