Tuple literal syntax

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

On Wed, 06 Oct 2010 23:04:35 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> There have been a couple of looong threads about tuples:
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/
Reddit_why_aren_t_people_using_D_93528.html
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/
Should_the_comma_operator_be_removed_in_D2_101321.html
> 
> A lot of it foundered on what the syntax for tuple literals should be.
> The top of the list is simply enclosing them in ( ). The problem with
> this is
> 
>   (expression)
> 
> Is that a parenthesized expression, or a tuple? This really matters,
> since (e)[0] means very different things for the two. Finally, I got to
> thinking, why not just make it a special case:
> 
> 
>   ( ) == tuple
>   (a) == parenthesized expression
>   (a,b) == tuple
>   (a,b,c) == tuple
>   (a,b,c,d) == tuple
> 
> etc.
> 
> No ambiguities! Only one special case. I submit this special case is
> rare, because who wants to define a function that returns a tuple of 1?
> Such will come about from generative programming, but:
> 
> (a,b,c)[0]
> 
> may be how the generative programming works, and that suggests:
> 
> (a,0)[0]
> 
> as how a user could generate a tuple of 1. Awkward, sure, but like I
> said, I think this would be rare.


--vote;

Personally, I don't think we should start adding a dedicated tuple syntax 
at this point.  There are so many things that are more important, and 
besides, I think the library tuples are pretty cool.  We should instead 
focus on making Tuple!(...) even better.

-Lars