Is implicit string literal concatenation a good thing?

[Don]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:12 PM, Denis Koroskin <2korden at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:50:51 +0300, Christopher Wright <dhasenan at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Brad Roberts wrote:
>>>> Back in c and c++, with it's pre-processor, merging adjacent string
>>>> literals is very handy.  In D, it's only marginally so, but not
>>>> completely useless.  It can still be used to break a really long string
>>>> literal into parts.  There's other string boundary tokens in D which
>>>> might well provide viable alternatives.
>>> In C and C++, there is no way to catenate strings at compile time. The
>>> only way to catenate strings is with strcat. That places the additional
>>> burden on programmers that they have to include string.h. For that reason,
>>> it makes sense to catenate adjacent string literals.
>>>
>>> In D, there's a compile time catenation operator that doesn't require
>>> libraries. So the catenation by association saves you only one character.
>>> I'd say that's useless.
>> I agree.
> 
> I use this feature pretty frequently to break up long strings.
> I think I didn't use ~ for that because it makes me think an
> allocation might happen when it doesn't need to.
> 
> But after seeing the discussion here I'd be happy to switch to using
> "a"~"b" as long as it's guaranteed by the language that such strings
> will be concatenated at compile time.   (I think the is the case now,
> right?)

Yes, and because of CTFE, even complicated applications of ~ frequently 
don't involve any allocation. So your intuition was wrong! Implicit 
concatentation was probably one of the things which led to your false 
impression. So it may be bad in that respect, as well as bug-breeding.



> 
> --bb