Concern about the ref return argument and scope

[deadalnix via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 28 January 2015 at 07:55:22 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 1/27/2015 8:57 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>> For ref return, we can still
>> make it safe by defining the lifetime of the ref return as the 
>> intersection of
>> the lifetime of the ref parameters and call it a day. As far 
>> as I can tell, this
>> cover the vast majority of cases.
>
> The trouble with that is when you *do* need to return a ref 
> that is unrelated to the ref parameters, there will be no way 
> to do it.

True, but unless you are returning a ref to a static variable, it 
has to come from an explicit or an implicit argument.

And the solution to this is not an ad hoc way to specify each 
useful lifetime we can think of, but have sensible defaults and a 
generic way to specify them when default fall short.