Flag proposal

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:isualt$hf2$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> 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.
>

That analysis of the situation hinges on the steadfast notion that Flag is a 
great thing. I absolutely appreciate doing things in library instead of 
language when reasonable to do so. You don't see me asking for map/reduce or 
ranges to be built into the language, do you? What a lot of people *don't* 
like is this seemingly frequent pattern:

1. Andrei comes up with something he feels is a great idea (And you do have 
a lot of genuinely great ideas, don't get me wrong. Probably more than most 
of us, certainly including me.)

2. The idea is posted to the NG ostensibly for discussion.

3. Andrei shoots down every objection as being wrong, failing to understand 
the idea's greatness, or some meta-argument trump card like "X is the N-word 
of the programming world" is pulled out.

4. The proposed idea can't possibly have any significant flaws, so everyone 
else on the board is obviously in contempt of something more fundamental, in 
this case, the strategy of preferring library solutions over language 
additions.

Just because some of us feel this one particular thing doesn't work well in 
library, does *not* imply we think new features are generally preferable as 
language additions. So please stop leaping to that conclusion.