Why can't static functions be virtual

[James Dennett]

John McAuley wrote:
> Sorry guys for not actually *listening* to your replies.
> 
> I inherited someone else's thread by replying to an old post.
> 
> The gist of his question was: why is it not *currently possible* to have virtual statics?
> 
> I got a lot of informative and factual responses. Thanks guys.
> 
> Of course, I was going off on one, imagining how easy it would be to implement virtual statics. So I didn't listen properly to the responses.
> 
> But moving on, I'd like to change the question to: 
> 
>  Do you think that it would be possible to implement virtual statics in D?

Quite possible, given one of many possible specifications;
the difficulty is in making such a specification useful
rather than brittle and confusing.  The difficulties with
the concept of virtual statics *are* conceptual, not
implementation issues.

If D has one advantage over C++, it is in its relative
simplicity.  Bogging it down with this kind of conceptual
murkiness won't help it as a language, IMO.

-- James