Consistency, Templates, Constructors, and D3

[Tommi]

On Friday, 24 August 2012 at 05:14:39 UTC, F i L wrote:
> To start, let's look at: cast(T) vs to!T(t)
>
> In D, we have one way to use template function, and then we 
> have special keyword syntax which doesn't follow the same 
> syntactical rules. Here, cast looks like the 'scope()' or 
> 'debug' statement, which should be followed by a body of code, 
> but it works like a function which takes in the following 
> argument and returns the result. Setting aside the "func!()()" 
> syntax for a moment, what cast should look like in D is:
>
>     int i = cast!int(myLong);

I agree that cast!int(myLong) looks better and more consistent 
than cast(int)myLong. But I think your proposed syntax 
improvement fails when you're casting to const or immutable:

cast(const)myArray  -->  cast!const(myArray)

Then it looks like we're passing a keyword as a template argument.