DMD 0.168 release

[Georg Wrede]

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Better array literals.
>>
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/changelog.html
> 
> 
> Could I please have your feedback on this sometime soon?
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/pnews/read.php?server=news.digitalmars.com&group=digitalmars.D&artnum=41978 

The following questions are possibly way-noobs, but I hope I'm not the 
only one who's understanding might benefit from some info. :-)

Oh, and this is not at all directed towards the proposal: for all I 
know, what I ask here is "the usual way to do it".

On the above refferd page, a couple of things stuck in the eye:

  - Why is Statement split between BasicStatement and the other three, 
and only then the rest of the statements (the subs of BasicStatement)? I 
mean, the reason for this is not immediately obvious.

  - (This probably is a real stupid question:) in IfCondition it says

          'auto' Identifier '=' Expression
          Declarator '=' Expression

one would think that the "auto" line would be sort-of included in the 
Declarator line. In other words, isn't "auto" just a case of 
declaration? (In D overall, not specifically here.)

  - DoStatement has an explicit ';' at the end, the others don't. What 
am I missing here?

  - In what circumstances would a Pragma statement create or need to 
create a new scope? (Yes, I'm ignorant on this...)

---

Stewart, I wish I could say that all the suggestions seemed valid and 
good, but since I just declared myself ignorant, I can't. ;-)

Oh, the existence of both LabelledStatement and LabeledStatement, and so 
on -- does give the impression that this BNF never actually has been 
used as input to a parser generator? I seem to remember that Walter 
doesn't use any of this because his parser is hand-written.

Still, I think it is imperative that we have a valid and usable BNF 
spec! And this spec should be the Canonical authority, should DMD, GDC 
or other compilers or people find issues in D syntax.

Of course we now have the front-end to use for such, but that is IMHO 
not a viable solution for studying the language, for writing third-party 
D compilers, or for automatic tools.