Suggestion: Change precedence of 'new'

[Simen Kjaeraas]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:32:01 +0200, Bill Baxter  
<dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote:

> Sometimes it's handy to invoke a function on a class right after  
> creating it:
>
>      new Thread(&func).run();
>
> Unfortunately that doesn't work in D right now.  You have to put  
> parentheses around the new expression because it has lower precedence  
> than dotExpression:
>
>       (new Thread(&func)).run();
>
> I don't recall how it works in C++, but at least in Java, the first  
> version works.
>
> I'm not a grammar guru, so can anyone who is say whether the above  
> change would be possible?
>
> Maybe it would muck up construction based on fully qualified names?   So  
> that
>
>    new thread.Thread(&func)
>
> would have to become
>
>    new (thread.Thread(&func)
>
> If so that would suck.  But Java is able to make it work somehow, and  
> the construct seems to be used quite heavily there (I've been looking at  
> a lot of SWT code lately...)
>
> --bb


You can work around this with static opCalls.

class foo
{
     static foo opCall()
     {
         return new foo();
     }

     int bar()
     {
       return 4;
     }
}


int a = foo().bar;

Still requires a parentheses, but you might like it better.

-- Simen