A few simple syntactic proposals

[Robert Fraser]

Scott S. McCoy wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 17:38 -0700, Robert Fraser wrote:
>> 2. Allow interfaces that are not sub-interfaces of IUnknown to be 
>> explicitly "delete"d.
> 
> Could you maybe elaborate on this a bit?  Maybe it's just because I
> don't yet have the full D 2.0 proposed specification memorized, but what
> on earth are you talking about? :-)

Sure. Say you have this:

""
interface Lolcat { }

class Happycat : Lolcat { }

int main(string[] args)
{
     Lolcat cat = new Happycat();
     // ...
     delete cat; // Right now, this is illegal
}
""

The proposal is to make it legal to explicitly delete instances of an 
interface. It is illegal right now because interfaces can refer to a COM 
interface, which is not managed by D memory. But all COM interfaces are 
sub-interfaces of IUnknown so it's known at compile-time that they are 
so, thus the restriction can be applied only to them.

Also, the more I think about it, extern(C++) interfaces might not be 
easily deletable, but again this is known at compile time, so delete can 
be restricted on them as well.