Proposal: struct and array literal syntax

[Stewart Gordon]

Boris Wang wrote:
<snip>
> May be:
> 
>  int[][]![
>      ![1,2,3,4],
>      ![5,6,7,8],
>      ![9,0,1,2],
>      ![3,4,5,6],
>  ]
> 
> the type of ![1,2,3,4] can be inferred. 

To me, using '!' in the prefix position like this is just asking for 
confusion (potentially from both human-readability and parsing POVs) 
with the NOT operator.

How about the contents of an array literal following the initialiser 
syntax?  Then it would be

     int[][]![
         [1,2,3,4],
         [5,6,7,8],
         [9,0,1,2],
         [3,4,5,6]
     ]

Of course, this would be syntactic sugar for the aforementioned

     int[][]![
         int[]![1,2,3,4],
         int[]![5,6,7,8],
         int[]![9,0,1,2],
         int[]![3,4,5,6]
     ]

Indeed, ages ago I pointed out that the inability to initialise 
non-static arrays seems to be an arbitrary restriction.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/26695.html

One possible approach to lifting this restrictions is to treat an 
initialiser on a non-static array as syntactic sugar for an array literal.

But on the whole, I quite like the int[]! syntax.  We could make it work 
for associative array literals as well, and at the same time make it 
possible to initialise such things.

Stewart.