Elliotte Rusty Harold's take on Java

[Yigal Chripun]

On 17/09/2009 16:15, Justin Johansson wrote:
>> making primitives full objects is the right design and has nothing to do
>> with bloat which just means the implementation sucks.
>>
>> consider:
>>
>> struct Integer(int bits, signed = true) {...}
>> with specializations for 8, 16, 32, 64
>>
>> Integer!(32) will have the same size as an int since structs don't have
>> vtables in D.
>>
>> of course, for this to be truly useful the compiler needs to understand
>> "123.methodName()" kind of code.
>
> And I'm guessing you didn't mean auto-boxing either?
>

of course not. auto boxing is a patch for a broken design.

it's already possible to define in D:
void func(type[] arr, params) {}
and use it as:
type[] arr;
arr.func(params);

applied to strings (which are just regular arrays in D), you can do:

string str = "Hello World";
str.toUpper(); // assume to upper is defined as above.

next step would be to allow the same for literals:
"hello World".toUpper();

now let's take the above one step further. why limit this to arrays? why 
not make it work for numbers as well?
123.next(); could be understood by the compiler as
Integer.next(123);

No bloat required.