A few simple syntactic proposals

[Tomasz Sowinski]

Bill Baxter Wrote:

> The argument is that 'length' is a "stealth keyword".
> It's not an official keyword, but you can't really use it for variable 
> names because they'll conflict with that implicit 'length' inside brackets.
> 
> Just using $ always for slicing solves that since $ is never a legal 
> variable name.  Besides, do we really need two ways to do exactly the 
> same thing?  I've never used "length" in indexing in D because I'm never 
> sure what it's going to do (many of my structs have a length property to 
> mimic built-in arrays -- if I say foo[0..length] in a method of that 
> struct which 'length' will it use?), and because $ is a lot less to type.
> 

I totally agree - I expect short names inside [..], like i, j, k, maybe "min", but "length" is just ugly and you somehow stop noticing it's a slice - the squared brackets start to look so small if you have something that big inside.

array[3..$] should be the only way.

Tomek