primitive vector types

[Mattias Holm]

Since (SIMD) vectors are so common and every reasonabe system support 
them in one way or the other (and scalar emulation of this is rather 
simple), why not have support for this in D directly?

Yes, the array operations are nice (and one of the main reasons for why 
I like D :) ), but have the problem that an array of floats must be 
aligned on float boundaries and not vector boundaries. In my mind 
vectors are a primitive data type that should be exposed by the 
programming language.

Something OpenCL-like:

	float4 vec;
	vec.xyzw = {1.0,1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; // assignment
	vec.xyzw = vec.wyxz; // permutation
	vec[i] = 1.0; // indexing

And then we can easily immagine some extra nice features to have with 
respect to operators:

	vec ^ vec2; // 3d cross product for float vectors, for int vectors xor

Has this been discussed before?

/ Mattias