DIP25 draft available for destruction

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 10:09:48PM -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 2/6/2013 8:16 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
> >As for the address taking, I hope it doesn't end up in being
> >nannied to much by the language. Like in the case with printf,
> >it could really piss people off that don't understand the
> >reasoning behind it. Make the error message informative for
> >that: "Potential escape of pointer to stack local" or
> >similar.
> 
> I think C++ missed an opportunity with reference types. All they are
> in C++ are just another way to express a pointer. They don't really
> offer any semantic improvement - you can even have null references.
> 
> In D, we have an opportunity to define reference types as a kind of
> "safe" pointer type - where we can get much of the advantages of
> pointers without the potential for memory corruption.

D ref types are currently highly crippled because of the inability to
declare ref variables, which mandates ugly workarounds. It should be a
first-class type qualifier IMO. (Yes I know it's currently a *function*
qualifier, not a type qualifier... which makes it all the more ugly.)


T

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