shorter alternative of constructor with parameter

[Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2014 15:47:03 -0400, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d  
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Jun 2014 18:50:21 +0000
> Xinok via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 21 June 2014 at 17:17:57 UTC, Suliman wrote:
>> > Dart and few others modern languages support short declaration
>> > constructor with parameter:
>> >
>> > class Person {
>> >   String name;
>> >
>> >   Person(String name) {
>> >     this.name = name;
>> >   }
>> > }
>> >
>> > // Shorter alternative
>> > class Person {
>> >   String name;
>> >
>> >   // parameters prefixed by 'this.' will assign to
>> >   // instance variables automatically
>> >   Person(this.name);
>> > }
>> >
>> > it's there any DIP for adding this future to D?
>>
>> I'd prefer that we didn't crowd the language with minor shortcuts
>> like these, and save syntactic sugar for more useful features.
>> Plus, it would be easy enough to make a string mixin which
>> generates such boilerplate code.
>
> Agreed. This would just add more stuff to the language that people would  
> have
> to understand, and it really doesn't add much benefit. It's just a  
> slightly
> terser syntax - and one that doesn't fit in with any other kind of  
> function
> declarations in D to boot.

Yeah, I don't think we save much with this. A mixin should be able to  
assign all the names given in the parameters that you name the same way.

In fact, I bet one can write a boiler-plate string that works for ANY  
class, using __traits(allMembers), as long as your parameter names match  
the member names. Then you just mixin that string as the first thing in  
the ctor.

-Steve