Carmack about static analysis

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, December 24, 2011 21:37:12 Kapps wrote:
> The two biggest things that I believe D would benefit from, in terms of
> readability, are UFCS and C#-style lambdas (which were already discussed).
> 
> Something like
> 'array(find("test", select!("a.name")(filter!("a.num > 3")(Elements))))'
> Could be rewritten much cleaner as
> Elements.filter!"a.num > 3"
> .select!"a.name"
> .find("test")
> .array();
> 
> The first one is very confusing, hard to split across multiple lines
> without losing meaning, and difficult to see what it even operates on
> (assume Elements is not an array and thus can not be used with the
> current implementation of UFCS). The second one, you can clearly see
> operates on Elements, you can clearly split it across multiple lines,
> and it's very obvious where things stop and end. Plus, it eliminates at
> least one set of parenthesis per function call, not to mention being
> much easier to write as it's in order of steps instead of opposite order.

I think that that's partially a function of how much programming you've done 
in functional languages. I personally find the first one to be far more 
readable. The second one seems horribly backwards.

- Jonathan M Davis