Attribute inference for non-templated functions

[Artur Skawina via Digitalmars-d]

On 03/30/16 16:20, Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 30 March 2016 at 12:57:56 UTC, Mathias Lang wrote:
>> It's a design decision. You want to be able to fix the exact type of your function, in order to provide headers for them for example (so you can work with libraries for which the source code is not available).
>>
>> If you want attribute inference, you can either make it a dummy template or, with a recent enough compiler, use `auto` return type.

And making an inferred return type imply attribute inference was a serious
design mistake (there is no such thing as an 'auto' type in D).
Overloading ret-type inference like that, w/o any way to opt-out, means that
ret-type inference became impossible in some situations, at least w/o ugly
hacks to fool the compiler. Keep in mind that we're talking about a
language that lacks a way to name certain classes of symbols, which makes
inference unavoidable...


> Note that giving your function an `auto` return type is the same as making it template function with no template args.

No, it's not. A template is a template, and a function with an inferred
return type is still a function (eg you can instantiate the former and
you can take the address of the latter).

artur