Changing the behavior of the comma operator
Meta
jared771 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 25 11:33:56 PDT 2014
On Tuesday, 25 March 2014 at 17:33:20 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> After the recent discussions regarding the comma operator, and
> after inspecting the patterns of code affected by it, Walter
> and I would back up the following change to the D language:
>
> 1. The comma operator stays with its current syntax.
>
> 2. The semantics is the same unless warnings are enabled with
> "-w"
>
> 3. In "-w" mode, semantics are changed in that the type of the
> comma operator is NOT the type of its last expression, but
> instead it's void.
>
> 4. Later on the warning will be promoted to a deprecation
> followed by removal from the language.
>
> 5. Reintroducing the result type as a tuple remains a future
> possibility.
>
> We believe the change would be beneficial for the following
> reasons:
>
> 1. Based on druntime and phobos, the breakage is likely to be
> infrequent.
>
> 2. The change may catch (and has caught) important bugs caused
> by misplacing closing parentheses.
>
> 3. Most code using the result of the comma expression looks
> foreign even to seasoned programmers and might gain in clarity
> from a refactor.
>
>
> Please reply to discuss this possibility.
>
>
> Andrei
Having the comma expression return void is a pretty clever way of
disallowing most of its buggy usage. You mentioned in the other
thread that we are looking at 5 years or more before the comma
operator can be used in tuple expressions. Is that timeline still
accurate with these proposed changes?
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