Public outcry against new .init behaviour

[Kristian Kilpi]

On Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:04:09 +0300, Walter Bright  
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> Deewiant wrote:
>> It's not deadly - I found 14 instances of such in about 7000 LOC (wc  
>> -l), and
>> they can be corrected - but it makes code noticeably uglier. This is  
>> one of
>> those small, simple bits of syntactic sugar which make coding in D fun  
>> and
>> productive. I want it back.
>
> I'll repost what I did earlier on this:
>
>> Andrei made an argument that if one had:
>>      struct S
>>     {
>>         static int foo;
>>     }
>>      S s = ...;
>>     assert(s.foo == S.foo);
>>  then, analogously:
>>      T t = ...;
>>     assert(t.init == T.init);
>>  should hold as well. Consistency is a strong argument.
>
>
> I like the old behavior too, but with the increasing use of generic  
> code, I worry that the inconsistency is going to cause a lot of problems  
> in the future.

I fail to see how this is a matter of consistency. To me, it's a matter of  
definition:
't.init' means the initialization value of the *variable* 't'.
'T.init' means the initialization value of the *type* 'T'.

Now 't.init' is meaningless.


Well, if one wants consistency ;) , lets consider the following:

   struct Z {
     static int x;
     int y;
   }
   Z a, b;

Because 'a.x == b.x' holds, 'a.y == b.y' should hold too? <g>