static arrays becoming value types

[Leandro Lucarella]

dsimcha, el 20 de octubre a las 02:44 me escribiste:
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1 at digitalmars.com)'s article
> > Currently, static arrays are (as in C) half-value types and
> > half-reference types. This tends to cause a series of weird problems and
> > special cases in the language semantics, such as functions not being
> > able to return static arrays, and out parameters not being possible to
> > be static arrays.
> > Andrei and I agonized over this for some time, and eventually came to
> > the conclusion that static arrays should become value types. I.e.,
> >    T[3]
> > should behave much as if it were:
> >    struct ??
> >    {
> >       T[3];
> >    }
> > Then it can be returned from a function. In particular,
> >    void foo(T[3] a)
> > is currently done (as in C) by passing a pointer to the array, and then
> > with a bit of compiler magic 'a' is rewritten as (*a)[3]. Making this
> > change would mean that the entire array would be pushed onto the
> > parameter stack, i.e. a copy of the array, rather than a reference to it.
> > Making this change would clean up the internal behavior of types.
> > They'll be more orthogonal and consistent, and templates will work better.
> > The previous behavior for function parameters can be retained by making
> > it a ref parameter:
> >     void foo(ref T[3] a)
> 
> Vote++.  It's funny, I use static arrays so little that I never realized that they
> weren't passed by value to functions.  I'd absolutely love to be able to just
> return static arrays from functions, and often use structs to do that now, but
> using structs feels like a really ugly hack.

It would be the poor men tuple for returning (homogeneous) stuff =P

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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