Would like to see ref and out required for function calls

[F i L]

On Friday, 7 September 2012 at 11:33:41 UTC, Kevin McTaggart 
wrote:
> I've been looking at migrating a reasonably large ship motion 
> library (tens of thousands of lines) from C# to D.  I've become 
> quite enthusiastic about D, and most of my problems have been 
> relatively minor (e.g., inconsistent bugs with 
> std.container.Array, would like orange serialization to give me 
> an error telling me I didn't register a class before calling 
> serialize).  I suggest that the language require ref and out 
> when calling functions, as C# requires.  This would make code 
> easier to understand, and would also eliminate the problem I 
> had when the wrong function from the following choices was 
> mistakenly called:
>
> parseLineInts(string text, int positionStart, out int j0, out 
> int j1)
>
> parseLineInts(string text, out int j0, out int j1, out int j2)
>
> I note that the second function calls another function as 
> follows:
> int positionStart = 1;
> parseLineInts(text, positionStart, j0, j1, j2);
>
> I look forward to seeing feedback from D experts.  This is the 
> only significant change that I could think of recommending for 
> the language.

+1. The fact that a value type is modified should be information 
the programmer can see at a glance.




Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Actually the darndest thing is that C# has retired the syntax 
> in 5.0 (it used to be required up until 4.0). Apparently users 
> complained it was too unsightly.

Citation? I'm using C# 5.0 with Visual Studios 2012 on Windows 8 
right now and ref/out are still required at the call sight of 
functions.