Should we deprecate comma?

[Marc Schütz" <schuetzm at gmx.net>]

On Monday, 24 March 2014 at 12:10:40 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
> On Monday, 24 March 2014 at 01:28:02 UTC, Kenji Hara wrote:
>> I'm partially against to it.
>>
>> 1. I think removing comma operator does not have useful effect 
>> for tuple
>> syntax discussion. For example:
>>
>>   1a. If you want to use parenthesis syntax (...) for tuple, 
>> we should
>> resolve one-element tuple ambiguity first.
>>         (exp)   // one-element tuple, or just an expression ?
>>      And,  removing comma operator does not resolve this issue.
>
> I believe this is a non-issue. From a language-users POV, there 
> should be no difference between a one-element tuple and an 
> expression, thus there's no need to distinguish the two. (The 
> actual implementation in the compiler may of course treat them 
> differently.)

On second thought, this would probably lead to problems in 
generic code, if we want to iterate over a tuple whose length we 
do not know, and which happens to have one element only. So there 
definitely needs to be a distinction between tuples and 
non-tuples.

But as this is about syntax only, the question is: Do we even 
need a dedicated syntax for one-element (and zero-element) 
tuples? When those are needed, they can easily be created using 
std.typecons.tuple(). The syntactic sugar is only really useful 
when we have multiple values, be it for returning or for 
assignment.