Kill implicit joining of adjacent strings

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:34:07 -0500, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com>  
wrote:

> Do you seen anything wrong in this code? It compiles with no errors:
>
> enum string[5] data = ["green", "magenta", "blue" "red", "yellow"];
> static assert(data[4] == "yellow");
> void main() {}
>
>
> Yet that code asserts. it's an excellent example of why a sloppy  
> compiler/language sooner or later comes back to bite your ass.
> I've recently had another bug caused by automatic joining of adjacent  
> strings. I think this is the 3rd I have found in my D code. This is  
> enough.
>
> In C the joining of adjacent strings is sometimes useful, but explicit  
> is better than implicit, and D has a short and good operator to perform  
> joining of strings, the ~, and D strings are allowed to span multi-lines.

100% agree.  Get rid of it.  My suggestion is to make auto-concatenation  
an error and see how many unintended errors there are in phobos.  This  
model of testing has helped to explain how features are bug prone in the  
past.

-Steve

P.S. WRT bearophile's constant nagging, I agree it's not the best way to  
be heard.  But if you feel strongly about something, and it's not getting  
attention, I don't see another way.  Note that if you didn't continuously  
nag about stylistic issues that are very subjective, nagging about real  
problems like this would carry more weight.

I wrote a very similar post that resulted in the destruction of class ==  
null from the language (ironically, I think it could be inserted back into  
the language now that object.opEquals is called instead).