Help!

[Eldar Insafutdinov]

On Monday, 26 November 2012 at 19:59:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/27/2012 5:52 AM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> I agree, and if I remember previous discussions on the subject
>> correctly, it seems like only Walter is in favor of upholding 
>> the
>> current restrictions of "alias" parameters to symbols. I 
>> simply do not
>> see a point in pushing compiler implementation details on the 
>> user like
>> that – for the programmer, a type is a type is a type…
>>
>> Walter, do you have an example of a situation where the alias 
>> parameter
>> restriction would be beneficial?  (for the D code involved, I 
>> don't mean
>> the few lines of code avoided in the compiler)
>
> In any case, it will break a great deal of existing code to 
> change  that behavior.

The discussed issue is one of those inconsistencies that make 
people struggle when using D. D's main selling point is rich 
metaprogramming. Others are rapidly catching up in the field of 
expressive native languages. If we set these early design 
decisions in stone, it means we will not be able to compete with 
them. And besides, are there many big proprietary D2 codebases 
that you afraid? I doubt there are. And Manu actually represents 
people who are willing to work on one, but are held off by these 
issues. Open source projects however will be easily fixable, and 
people using D will actually welcome these positive changes.