d-programming-language.org

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/3/11 3:50 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei:
>
>> Safe on top of flexible is the best design. If there is anything
>> preventing you from defining a type with the behavior you mention,
>> you may want to file a bug.
>
> I am not a believer. Compile time/run time integral overflows to be
> "good enough" need to be built-in, more than associative arrays. How
> do you implement the compile-time ones? Run-time integral overflows
> need to be tested everywhere you don't explicitly ask for them to not
> happen, otherwise you will not catch most bugs.
>
> Bye, bearophile

This and others (zero- vs. one-based indexing, closed vs. open intervals 
etc.) are issues with well-understood tradeoffs that could go either 
way. Making a choice in such matters becomes part of a language's ethos. 
After a while it becomes clear that rehashing such matters without 
qualitatively new arguments is futile.

Andrei