The Wrong Stuff

[Rioshin an'Harthen]

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Errors that we can eliminate by changing the design of the
> language, we should so eliminate (unless their costs 
> make the language unuseable, obviously).

So are you returning to the very bad design error in switch
statements? ;) Silent fall-through is bad, and keeps hitting
quite a few programmers - I don't have any links handy
right now, but I do remember it has been talked over before
here. What I'd like to see is requiring either a continue or
a break at the end of a case to make the intent clear. The
"problem" would be empty cases, as is the typical C-style
method to get multiple values to do the same thing, but these
have already been fixed in the language design with multiple
values per case statement and ranged case statements.

One of the general design principles of D has been "if it
compiles in C, it compiles in D and does the same thing or
it does not compile at all", if I remember correctly. I would
really like to see the C-style silent fallthrough to be a compile
time error, which would not contradict that design principle.
And if you have a lot of code that relies on this misfeature,
then it does not take long to add continue statements where
they're needed - not even if translating C source to D.