dmd 1.046 and 2.031 releases

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
> news:h2u735$sn8$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> grauzone wrote:
>>> I oriented this on the syntax of array slices. Which work that way. Not 
>>> inconsistent at all. It's also consistent with foreach(_; x..y).
>> It would look consistent, but it would behave very differently. x..y for 
>> foreach and slices is exclusive of the y, while case x..y is inclusive.
>>
> 
> The current way has that inconsistency:
> 
> variable .. variable   // exclusive end
> caseLabel .. caseLabel    // inclusive end
> 
> And yes, I know that's not how it's actually parsed, but that's how people 
> visually parse it.

I don't think so at all. There's a lot of punctuation that has different 
roles depending on the context. For example, ":" means key/value 
separator or ternary operator participant; "*" means multiplication or 
pointer dereference; "&" means taking address or binary "and"... plenty 
of examples. So you can't center on ".." and claim that it visually 
means the same thing even though the surrounding is different. You 
really have no argument here.

> Ah the hell with it, I don't care any more: The *real* issue here is that 
> the current switch, being based on C's, is horribly antiquated and what we 
> really need is a comprehensive redesign incorporating some sort of 
> generalized pattern matching. Like "case > 1, <= 10:" or something like 
> Nemerle, or whatever. I don't care, as long as it doesn't continue to get 
> trivialized as something that can be solved by tossing in a recycled ".." 
> here, a recycled "final" there, etc. 

On the full side of the glass, with the latest dmd release, the language 
has acquired some useful feature improvements and the implementation has 
fixed many bugs. Why the crankiness?


Andrei