disabling unary "-" for unsigned types

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

retard wrote:
> Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:36:59 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> - And finally in D2 there are several new features that are sometimes
>>> only half-implemented, and generally no one has tried them in long
>>> programs, they seem to come from just the mind of few (intelligent)
>>> people, they don't seem battle-tested at all. Such new features are a
>>> dangerous bet, they can hide many traps and problems. Finalizing the D2
>>> language before people have actually tried to use such features in some
>>> larger programs looks dangerous. Recently I have understood that this
>>> is why Simon Peyton-Jones said "Avoid success at all costs" regarding
>>> Haskell, that he has slowly developed for about 15 years: to give the
>>> language the time to be tuned, to remove warts, to improve it before
>>> people start to use it for rear and it needs to be frozen (today we are
>>> probably in a phase when Haskell has to be frozen, because there is
>>> enough software written in it that you can't lightly break backward
>>> compatibility).
>> The response of the Haskell community seems to be "avoid avoiding
>> success". Anyway, either slogan shouldn't be taken out of context, and I
>> don't think the situations of the two languages are easily comparable.
>> For example, a few years ago monads weren't around. At that point, a
>> different I/O method was considered "it" for functional programs (I
>> swear I know which, but I forgot).
> 
> There's not much choice here. Probably explicit state passing with a 
> state variable? People also invented other methods, but monads provided 
> an useful abstraction for other kind of use as well.

I'm telling you that pre-monads there was an I/O paradigm that everybody 
FP swore by. I learned about it in 2001 in my first grad level course, 
and actually wrote programs using it. The professor stressed how it had 
been all a fad and that monads may also be one. Since you waste no 
opportunity to walk us through your vast library, you may as well remind 
us what it was.

Andrei