Fixing const arrays

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 04:49:09 PST 2011


On 12 December 2011 14:24, torhu <no at spam.invalid> wrote:

> On 11.12.2011 22:24, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> ...
>
>  It was debated some time ago, and it ended up being a property. The fact
>> that
>> save is an action verb and not a noun automatically disqualifies it as a
>> property IMHO, but it was made into a property, and we're pretty much
>> stuck
>> with it at some point. As far as what the function does, I don't think
>> that
>> it's a problem that it's a property, but it's not named like a property,
>> so
>> the situation with regards to save is not ideal, but it's too late now.
>>
>
> I really don't get this.  When D has 10,000 programmers using it
> professionally, it's too late.  But now it's more like 5 or 10.  And they
> are all presumably aware that D2 is still undergoing some polish. So are
> the maybe a few hundred people that are using D for hobby projects.  They
> are early adopters, and they know what that entails.  I call bogus on the
> backwards compatibility argument.  There's not a lot to be compatible with
> at this stage.  Not compared to what D2 wants to become.
>
> As for Andrei's book using save with the parentheses:  If D2 gains
> traction, I'm sure there will be a second edition of that book.  And you
> already want to have the errata handy when using the book.  I don't see
> what the big deal is, at least not compared to letting this stay in the
> language forever.
>
> save being a property is a stupid inconsistency.  It's easy to fix, the
> cost is relatively low.  The people using D2 now are all part of a
> community that want D to succeed, as am I. It's a change for the better,
> which I'm sure most current D2 users would agree with.  How hard can it be?
>

I completely agree. One thing that most excited me about D at this stage,
and buying in as an early adopter is that the developers WILL have the
courage to make breaking changes if they're in the interest of creating a
better language.
I think every opportunity should be taken to make important breaking
changes while the community is as small as it is. If the changes are
reasonably trivial, then surely it doesn't trouble anyone THAT much to
update their code. If they're using D2, surely they know it's still in the
works.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20111212/a84dfb44/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list