auto storage class - infer or RAII?

[Bill Baxter]

Carlos Santander wrote:
> Walter Bright escribió:
> 
>> The auto storage class currently is a little fuzzy in meaning, it can 
>> mean "infer the type" and/or "destruct at end of scope". The latter 
>> only has meaning for class objects, so let's look at the syntax. There 
>> are 4 cases:
>>
> Since this has been talked a lot already, I'll only say: auto for RAII, 
> and something else (eg: var) for type inference.
> IMHO.

I agree.  Even if "everybody else is doing it", I think auto is a poor 
choice for an automatic type deduction indicator. I'd be much happier 
with any of

    var foo = expression;
    val foo = expression;
    def foo = expression;
    let foo = expression;

As an added bonus all of those are one character less than the current 
auto.  Which is good, since automatic type deduction is basically a 
typing saving feature to begin with.  To me 'auto' in front of an 
identifier looks like it's saying this is an "automatic variable", 
which, going back to the original K&R book, has always meant a local, 
scoped variable.  It sounds like it's going to do something at run time.

For anyone who complains "I'm using that as a variable name already", 
I'll write you a script to fix your files.  Here you go

    perl -pi -e 's/(\W)(val)(\W)/${1}${2}_${3}/g' *.d

Or if you may already have things name val_ in your code

    perl -pi -e 's/(\W)(val_*)(\W)/${1}${2}_${3}/g' *.d

--bb