Whence came UFCS?

[Simen Kjærås]

On Friday, 27 July 2018 at 10:30:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> It evolved out of D's member function call syntax for arrays - 
> basically, for years before we had UFCS in D, we had UFCS for 
> arrays. However, when and how that was added to arrays, I don't 
> know. I don't recall it ever not being in the language, but I 
> never used D1, and I don't know if it had it. At minimum, it's 
> been in D since early D2, if not much earlier. I'd have to do a 
> lot of spelunking through old releases to figure out when it 
> was added.
>
> Certainly, the origins of UFCS in D do not come from making it 
> possible to extend user-defined types with member functions. It 
> comes from wanting member function call syntax when using 
> arrays (probably aimed primarily at strings, but I don't know). 
> It's just that later it was proposed to extend it so that it 
> would work with any type and thus make the member function call 
> syntax universal.

This compiles in DMD 0.50 (oldest version on the download page, 
nov 20, 2002), so I think it's safe to say it's been around for a 
while:

void fun(int[] arr) {}

void main() {
     int[] a;
     a.fun();
}

Arrays' .reverse, .sort and others were added in 0.24, but I 
can't find a download for anything before 0.50.

--
   Simen