std.complex

[Shammah Chancellor]

On 2013-11-24 15:50:46 +0000, Joseph Rushton Wakeling said:

> On Saturday, 23 November 2013 at 15:13:22 UTC, Shammah Chancellor wrote:
>> I disagree.  I was using them for physics simulations.   They are very 
>> useful for the computational physics community.   Just because most 
>> people are still using FORTRAN does not mean they won't switch 
>> eventually.
> 
> Would it cause you any particular disadvantage to use the library 
> std.complex rather than the built-in complex type?

It would if the they don't work correctly.  There needs to be an 
Imaginary type and some proper operations between complex and imaginary 
types.  That doesn't seem to be the case currently.  I personally think 
having the built-in type is very helpful.  However, I can understand 
from a language perspective that having "i" around is hard for the 
parser.

Also, the argument "If complex/imaginary is built-in, why not have 
quaterions also" seems to imply that it should be a library type.

-Shammah