Does D have too many features?

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On 29.04.2012 4:31, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, April 29, 2012 01:54:35 Peter Alexander wrote:
>> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 23:37:14 UTC, F i L wrote:
>>> Peter Alexander wrote:
>>>> I'm serious. I don't like overloaded syntax.  foo.bar
>>>> shouldn't also mean (*foo).bar -- it causes confusion and
>>>> introduces ambiguities when either could work. Combine this
>>>> with opDispatch, UFCS and function overloading and your in for
>>>> some nasty headaches.
>>>
>>> Craziness. What could you possibly gain is there in forcing a
>>> pointer distinction at every point that it's used? We already
>>> declared the variable as a pointer, we don't need to be
>>> reminded of that fact at every line.
>>
>> It matters when you have things that imitate pointers (e.g. smart
>> pointers). Those will have their own members, separate from the
>> pointee's members, so ptr.foo could refer to the smart pointer's
>> members or the pointee's members.
>
> For better or worse, the solution for smart pointers in D would be to use
> opDispatch,

*cough* alias this *cough*

  but it _does_ still mean that the type pointed to can't have any
> of the same functions as the smart pointer (or at least, they would have to be
> called differently, since . would use opDispatch and therefore use the smart
> pointer's function), so you _do_ lose something over the ->  syntax here.
> However, the overall gain is usability probably still outweighs that. I
> wouldn't exactly have been heartbroken if ->  had been in D, but simplicity of
> not needing it can be very nice - and it can be invaluable in the case of
> templates, because then you don't have to distinguish between structs,
> pointers to structs, and classes when calling functions on them.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis


-- 
Dmitry Olshansky