Lints, Condate and bugs

[Walter Bright]

Ellery Newcomer wrote:
> Question: would it be feasible to make D use some sort of bignum type as 
> the default index type for arrays, etc, but make it possible for the 
> programmer to use uint or ulong or whatever for e.g. places where 
> performance is an issue?

I suspect that's a big jump in complexity for very little gain.

I also suspect that it would result in a drastic performance problem (remember, 
Python is 100x slower than native code), and will disable the advantages D has 
with type inference (as the user will be back to explicitly naming the type).


>> I don't think there's much value left for add-on static analysis tools.
> I went to the trouble of modifying dmd to warn on unsigned/signed 
> comparison. It found me some bugs which probably would not have been 
> noticed otherwise. Did it produce false positives? Yes. Did that make me 
> wish I hadn't done it? Hell no.

You might want to consider changing your coding style to eschew the use of 
unsigned types.


> The key idea is leave the 
> warnings off unless the programmer explicitly asks for it.

That's a good sentiment, but it doesn't work that way in practice. Warnings 
always become de-facto requirements. They aren't the solution to a disagreement 
about how the language should work.