Flag proposal

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/10/11 6:26 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei:
>
>> That's good evidence that introducing named parameters would be
>> quite involved.
>
> It's also good evidence that Martin Odersky, one of the most
> intelligent language designers alive today, is willing to do a lot to
> support named arguments in his language :-)

I have all respect for Odersky's competence, but that is beside the 
point. Design decisions are always taken in a context, and it's not 
impossible he would've had decided otherwise in a different context.

D is a rich, powerful language _now_. It has classic features present in 
many languages, and a few features that are not present in many. Their 
full combination is not present in any other language, and creates a 
unique context.

We've been historically trigger happy about discussing adding features 
in this group. This is not unique to D - all languages underwent the 
same process. But at this point it is a necessity that we start 
migrating our mindset from an endless wishlist - towards finding 
ingenious solutions within the language. Again, this is the case for 
every single language there is. Combining existing features towards new 
ends is in some ways more difficult than language design because you 
play within a confined ground, and I am a bit disappointed that a few 
posters have shown only contempt for such an effort.

> Probably implementing tuple unpacking syntax sugar too needs some not
> small changes, but they are well worth it (of those two features I
> think tuple unpacking syntax sugar is more important than named
> arguments).

What's wrong with myTuple.expand?


Andrei