iterators again

[Don Clugston]

David B. Held wrote:
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> [...]
>> Sounds like a good place for a D development blog.
> 
> A blog is an interesting idea, but Walter doesn't strike me as the 
> blogging type.
> 
>> [...]
>> What's a bit weird is that sometimes some feature will just come out 
>> of nowhere, with no announcement, no pre-discussion, no communication 
>> whatsoever besides a bullet on the "what's new with DMD 1.xxx" page.  
>> And they're not always trivial features either -- import() and mixin() 
>> expressions, struct literals, scope() statements, and nested classes 
>> were all "well OK, never saw that one coming" features.
> 
> Walter is trying to evolve the language as quickly as possible, and even 
> when he sets priorities, he later changes them for various reasons. 
> There has been discussion of a roadmap to help smooth things out, but 
> you should harrass Brad Roberts about that.  Which would you prefer: 
> vaporware announcements or surprise announcements?  I'll always take 
> overdeliver to overpromise every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

I agree. But I think the point was, that it would be nice to have *some 
idea* of what Walter's most interested in/currently coding/thinking 
about/etc. A list of 'areas most likely to change in the near term', or 
something. It does make a difference if you're trying to work around 
language limitations, to know whether a much better way is going to 
appear next week.
The 'future directions' page would do it if wasn't so completely 
useless: it's had "template inheritance" on it for years, but major 
stuff like CTFE wasn't on it.

The constness stuff is one of very few examples where Walter announced 
something *before* he'd implemented it <g>.

But hey, looking at the changelog when downloading the latest DMD 
release is like opening your Christmas presents <g>.