A nice way to step into 2012

[bearophile]

Timon Gehr: 

> => expr
> 
> should imo be a shorthand for
> 
> () => expr.
> 
> It saves some ((())(()))().

It saves few (), but zero argument lambdas aren't that common in my functional-style code, and I think it decreases syntax uniformity and code readability. So I think it's a bad idea.

On the other hand I think extending the applicability of this syntax to free functions/methods (as in Scala and Ada2012) is a nice idea, to shorten tiny functions/methods, that are common enough:

class C {
     private int x;
     int getX() => x;
}

------------------------

Walter:

>They expect to see it, or else they mark D as "not having lambdas" and "not supporting functional programming".<

To me this sounds like a bit silly argument to base language design on.

In my opinion the most important reason for the introduction of this anonymous function syntax is that it makes D functional-style code (and generally code that uses lot of callbacks) less noisy, so it makes it more easy to write and read.

Bye,
bearophile