D2 is really that stable as it is claimed to be?

[Paul Jurczak]

On Sunday, 22 September 2013 at 00:33:32 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/21/2013 5:11 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> Tracking the column number is certainly doable, but it comes 
>>> at a cost of
>>> memory consumption and some compile speed, since it has to be 
>>> tracked in
>>> every token. I used to do it in the Digital Mars C compiler, 
>>> but it was of
>>> only marginal utility and I dropped it.
>>
>> Can't you just hold a pointer to the beginning of the line and 
>> subtract to
>> find the column?  I agree that it's generally of marginal 
>> utility though.
>
> Holding the pointer has a cost of memory consumption and 
> compile speed :-) as well as having to have the source file 
> buffer stay around throughout the compile (to compute column 
> number you need the source in order to account for tabs & 
> Unicode).
>
> Of course, we can cheat and use a byte to store the column 
> number, as after all, nobody has more than 256 columns.
> [...]

That would do: 255 means column 256 or higher (256+). You would 
please more than 99.99% of users :-)