Switch-case made less buggy, now with PATCH!

[Bill Baxter]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>>
>> retard, el 23 de noviembre a las 17:34 me escribiste:
>>>
>>> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:18:05 -0300, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>>>
>>>> Andrei Alexandrescu, el 22 de noviembre a las 17:11 me escribiste:
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyway, I think Chad's proposal has not been discussed here before
>>>>> being implemented, which makes it more difficult to accept.
>>>>
>>>> I think the exact opposite. It's much easier to accept (or reject)
>>>> something that have an actual implementation. You can talk about
>>>> something real, not vaporware. I wish all proposals made here were
>>>> proposed with a patch.
>>>>
>>>> Of course that's a lot of work and people usually don't want to make the
>>>> effort to write a patch if chances are it will be rejected. But if the
>>>> rules are clear ("your patch can be rejected"), I think you should
>>>> encourage feature proposal with proof-of-concept patch.
>>>
>>> The fact that a patch already exists does not make the design decision
>>> any better. If we all started writing crappy, contradicting extensions and
>>> Walter had to accept everything, D would quickly sink. There are only a
>>> handful of active members in this community that have enough experience and
>>> skills to propose any good features at this point of d development cycle.
>>
>> And what I said above doesn't contradict this, on the contrary.
>>
>> In other OSS projects, almost the *only* way to ask for a feature is
>> providing a patch. Then the feature is discussed (and most of the time
>> discarded). Having a patch only improves the decision making process.
>>
>> Again, and in case it's hard to understand, I'm not saying the any patch
>> should be accepted. Even more, I don't think Chad's patched should be
>> accepted, I also think introducing case !: is a bad idea. I'm just saying
>> that the patch was mostly turned down because he didn't asked for other
>> devs permission to make the patch, not because of the quality of the patch
>> (or the feature) itself. That discourages people to make patches, and
>> I think that's *really* bad.
>>
>> Again, that was only my perception, maybe this was not the intention of
>> the people who wrote the messages.
>
> I understand and agree. One issue we're facing right now is that the
> publication of the D source is relatively recent and the number of
> contributors is relatively low. In this context, if we required anyone who
> ever wants to propose a feature to also provide a patch we'd pretty much
> kill the traffic on this group. I look forward to the day when that request
> will become reasonable.
>
> The positive side remains: Chad now knows enough about the implementation to
> accommodate any change to the design.
>
> At any rate, after having discussed this more with Walter, it looks like the
> switch semantics is here to stay. He claims to use fall through fairly often
> (in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary) and finds the notion
> that you need to wrote "goto case x;" just before "case x:" completely
> stupid. I disagree but I also want to carefully pick my fights so I'll leave
> this matter to others.

How would Walter feel about
case continue;
or
continue case;
??

--bb