My Kingdom For ...

[Christopher Wright]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On the other hand, the "return a reference" solution also has drawbacks 
> in that it exposes the implementation and gives up control over the 
> element.  Consider for instance an array wrapper where you want to track 
> every modification to every element.  Currently you can do that quite 
> easily by making opIndexAssign the only means of modifying the data. But 
> then you can't do things like a[10] += 5.   So I think there's a place 
> for the solution you use in MiniD as well.  Even after reference returns 
> become possible I'd be happy to see the compiler use that trick in cases 
> where there is no reference-returning version of opIndex defined.
> 
> --bb

C# does exactly the same as MiniD. I don't recall how that works with 
opDot on structs, though.