DMD 0.177 release

[John Reimer]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:57:51 -0800, Sean Kelly <sean at f4.ca> wrote:

> John Reimer wrote:
>>   From the perspective of setting initial state, classes in the OOP  
>> context use constructors to do that.  Structs were never intended to  
>> have OOP like syntax (or so it seems to me).  Why can't structs just  
>> use an initializer like constants or statics?  I notice that Walter has  
>> added the struct initialization using S(x) syntax.  I think it is  
>> somewhat strange, but I suppose that was designed to be an alternative  
>> to constructor initialization?   What happened to something like a  
>> struct literal intializer (which only works for static structs and  
>> constant values)?  Why can't such initialization be extended to local  
>> structs?
>>  ....
>> struct S
>> {
>>    int i;
>>    bool b;
>> }
>>  static S t = { 5, true };  // must be "static" or initialization won't  
>> work
>
> I think the problem here is that such initializers would not apply to  
> private data, and more to the point, a ctor can do more than simply  
> assign a constant to each member of the struct.  But it would be nice if  
> this syntax worked for non-static structs anyway.
>

Ah true.  But then, maybe there shouldn't be private data in a struct  
either. :)

I still see structs as a fairly basic non-OOP entity.

-JJR