Discussion Thread: DIP 1036--Formatted String Tuple Literals--Community Review Round 1

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 9/12/20 5:27 AM, claptrap wrote:
> On Saturday, 12 September 2020 at 02:48:38 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Friday, 11 September 2020 at 20:46:05 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>>> This solves the issue of accidentally passing the wrong thing
>>
>> And processing an i"" is trivial; it is just either a string or a 
>> subclass of string (aka a struct with alias toString this) and you'd 
>> just use it like that.
>>
>> The t"" is more composable; it is the superior language feature. But I 
>> can live with a convenience compromise.
>>
>> So we'll see.
> 
> Thats a step in the right direction IMO.

To me it seems akin to that moment you realize the practical joke has 
gone too far.

Flight attendant: "More of anything?"
Seinfeld: "More of everything!"

So now we're talking about not one, but two interpolated strings. Deus 
Ex Machina and all that. (For fun and giggles: Good Work six months from 
now will make their semantics juuuuust slightly different.) How is this 
great design? There is so much to be said about sense and sensibility; 
living under one's means; economy of mechanism; creating a part of a 
whole; and such.

I really feel we miss a different mind on the team. Someone who just 
thinks differently. Like an architect. Or a novelist.

One possibility - which sadly comes from my limited engineering mind - 
is to create and observe budgets for metrics that are proxies to complexity.

* 1000 words in the DIP
* 1000 words complete documentation
* 1000 words tutorial
* 1000 lines in total implementation (compiler + library)
* 30 seconds explanation that doesn't omit any dangerous subtleties