auto: useful, annoying or bad practice?

IntegratedDimensions IntegratedDimensions at gmail.com
Sun May 6 10:12:18 UTC 2018


On Monday, 30 April 2018 at 21:11:07 UTC, Gerald wrote:
> I'll freely admit I haven't put a ton of thought into this post 
> (never a good start), however I'm genuinely curious what 
> people's feeling are with regards to the auto keyword.
>
> Speaking for myself, I dislike the auto keyword. Some of this 
> is because I have a preference for static languages and I find 
> auto adds ambiguity with little benefit. Additionally, I find 
> it annoying that the phobos documentation relies heavily on 
> auto obscuring return types and making it a bit more difficult 
> to follow what is happening which gives me a bad taste for it.
>
> Having said, the thing that really started my thinking about 
> this was this post I made:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/thread/fytefnejxqdgotjkprpo@forum.dlang.org
>
> Where in order to declare a public variable for the 
> RedBlackTree lowerBound/upperBound methods I had to fall back 
> on using the ReturnType template to declare a variable. 
> Jonathan was nice enough to point me in the right direction and 
> maybe there's a way to do this without having to fall back on 
> ReturnType. However this made be wonder if reliance on auto 
> could discourage API writers from having sane return types.
>
> So I'm curious, what's the consensus on auto?

Auto is useful... simple as that. If you don't like it don't use 
it. If you get confused about it then beef up your game in 
analysis. Obscurity can be done many ways so complaining about 
one specific way is not very thought out.

myfunkytypethatyoudontknowabouthiddenthrough100layersofabstraction foo();



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