Declaring Ref Variables Inside Function Calls

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu, el 31 de marzo a las 17:57 me escribiste:
>>> Agree. They should be first class citizen as dynamic arrays or hashes.
>> Why? Not grokking it.
> 
> It's perfectly explained in this thread why, all I have to say will
> repeate something already said (the int[] vs. std::vector<int> mostly). Of
> course you don't seem to agree with those arguments...

Well I don't agree, but maybe there's more arguments that could improve 
that.

> If they are not 1st citizens you just end up:
> 1) not using them
> 2) making your code look like boost, I mean *really* ugly ;)
>    (when what you want to do it's even possible, of course)
> 

Tuple is a 1st citizen language constituent (they have to). It just 
doesn't have a literal. Say we do invent a literal, e.g.:

[: int, float :] mytuple;

Does this improve the language over Tuple!(int, float)? I'm not 
convinced - at all, in fact. Right now Tuple is on equal footing with 
other templates and whatever introspection we have/will add works/will 
work on Tuple as it works with other templates. With the extra syntax, 
we'll then need to add special methods for introspecting a tuple. We'll 
find ourselves also reserving a keyword "tuple" and positing that [: ... 
:] is the same as tuple!(...) or some other similarly unpleasant 
solution. Plus, special syntax contributes to the disconnect between 
user-defined and built-in. This creates the self-perpetuating trend that 
if anything is interesting, it should have a literal allocated to it. 
Instead of that, let's think e.g. of methods to generally make 
parameterized types look better.


Andrei