Changing the behavior of the comma operator

[bearophile]

Andrei Alexandrescu:

> I personally use the implicit concatenation on occasion and it 
> doesn't trip me, but I wouldn't mind adding a ~.

While it's not a very common bug, it has tripped me few times.

This is where I raised the issue in 2010:
https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3827

Walter agreed to remove it:
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=121830


> I feel changing string concatenation right now is just thinking 
> small.

Fixing a little design mistake that causes bugs is not stopping 
all the other people like you from thinking about the more 
significant issues like concurrency, parallelism, reference 
scope, synchronized, and so on. Probably 80% of the bugs in 
Bugzilla are about very small things, like a missing assert, a 
wrong error message, or even wrong words used in documentation. 
Fixing those things is useful. Just because a problem is waiting 
for a fix in Bugzilla for years can't justify to close it down. 
In Bugzilla there are some other little breaking changes waiting 
to happen.

There are operator precedence-related problems caused by 
replacing the implicit concatenation with a ~.


> But in a way that's beside the point. I'd much rather make 
> non-breaking improvements to the language, as there are plenty 
> of opportunities.

I don't agree. It's much better to fix the little breaking 
changes now, and think about non-breaking improvements later. 
Because later the breaking changes will become less and less 
possible.

Bye,
bearophile