static array literal syntax request: auto x=[1,2,3]S;

[Mehrdad]

On Friday, 15 June 2012 at 07:15:50 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, June 15, 2012 09:09:48 Don Clugston wrote:
>> On 10/06/12 23:43, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> > On Sunday, June 10, 2012 23:23:57 Mehrdad wrote:
>> >> I honestly don't see the POINT of having a "dynamic array
>> >> literal".
>> >> 
>> >> What's the point of making the literals dynamic?
>> >> 
>> >> They should all be static, and only converted to dynamic if
>> >> necessary from the context.
>> >> 
>> >> But I really don't see the benefit of allocating them on 
>> >> the heap
>> >> just because we can... perhaps someone can enlighten me?
>> > 
>> > In the vast majority of cases where an array literal is 
>> > used, it's
>> > assigned to a dynamic array.
>> 
>> I doubt that very much. I know it's not true in my code, I use 
>> array
>> literals almost exclusively for immutable values.
>> Usually if you are initializing an array, where you will 
>> modify the
>> elements later, you want all values to be the same.
>> 
>> I argued that array literals should be immutable, just as 
>> string
>> literals are. But I lost.
>
> What does immutability have to do with static vs dynamic?
>
> immutable a = [0, 1, 2, 3];
>
> results in an immutable(int[]), not immutable(int[4]).
>
> - Jonathan M Davis


Just a guess here, but I think what Don meant was this:

An immutable _literal_ is quite often "static __gshared" (it's 
pretty pointless to make it an instance member...), which means 
it's always in memory, which means it should be static (as 
opposed to dynamic), since slicing it wouldn't cause problems.