Tuple DIP

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, February 16, 2018 21:01:02 Martin Nowak via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 01/14/2018 12:21 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> >> what would be the equivalent of this ?
> >> ` writeln(tuple!("x", "y", "z")(2, 3, 4).y); `
> >
> > It would continue to work the same way.
> >
> > I did consider adding a proposal for built-in named tuple syntax:
> >
> > writeln((x: 2, y: 3, z: 4).y);
> >
> > (int a, double b) t = (a: 1, b: 2.0);
> > int x = t.a;
> > double y = t.b;
>
> Tuples are anonymous bundles, when you want a product type with field
> names use a struct.

That's not necessarily unreasonable, but std.typecons.Tuple is frequently
used as a convenient way to return a group of values, and the trend has been
towards using named values, because those are easier to deal with as return
values, because they're somewhat self-documenting at that point, and they're
less error-prone. So, if we're talking about adding more complete tuples to
the language, if they don't have support for names, you then have the
problem of whether it's better to use the built-in tuples or something like
std.typecons.Tuple with named values, and there's a pretty strong argument
at that point that it's better to use the named tuples and lose whatever
benefits the built-in tuples might provide, because the named tuples result
in more maintainable code.

- Jonathan M Davis