Automatic typing

[Walter Bright]

On 7/1/2013 6:39 AM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> This is not what I am talking about and it seems quite dangerous to have
>> one variable name masquerade as multiple variables.
>
> Why dangerous?

D already disallows:

     int x;
     {   float x;
     }

as an error-prone construct, so why should it allow:

     int x;
     float x;

?

> I've been programming in Ruby for quite a time and never found it
> to be a problem, but an advantage.

What advantage? Does Ruby have a shortage of names for variables? (Early 
versions of BASIC only allowed variable names with one letter, leading to some 
pretty awful workarounds.)


> Show me an example where this is dangerous (the pointer example gave by Walter
> is not valid anymore since it has a fix).

I'm actually rather sure that one can come up with rule after rule to 'fix' each 
issue, but good luck with trying to fit all those rules into some sort of 
comprehensible framework. Consider what happened to C++ when they tried to fit 
new things into the overloading rules - the rules now span multiple pages of 
pretty arbitrary rules, and practically nobody understands the whole. What 
people do is randomly try things until it seems to do the right thing for them, 
and then they move on.

And all this for what - nobody has come up with a significant reason to support 
this proposal. I see post after post in this thread trying to make it work, and 
nothing about what problem it solves.