Associative arrays

[Ola Fosheim Grostad]

On Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 08:08:10 UTC, Chris Piker wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 07:50:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad 
> wrote:
>> I hope it stays unimplemented. AAs should be replaced by a 
>> library solution and AA literals should work with custom AAs. 
>> The special casing is not good for metaprogramming.
>
> I'm new to D and don't come from a hard-core C++ background.  
> On naive first take, the fact that D had a construct resembling 
> python dictionaries made D more attractive. In fact, it was AAs 
> that finally tipped me in favor of trying D.
>
> Can you tell me more about why AAs are an undesirable language 
> feature?

Hashing strategies needs contextual knowledge. But that is not 
the main reason. The main reason is that D needs better 
metaprogramming. A hashmap literal should bind to any hashtable. 
There is no reason to not make it a 100% library construct. Stuff 
it into your runtime and you would hardly notice any difference.

Golden design rule: never add language features that can be done 
as library constructs, ever.