Things that make writing a clean binding system more difficult

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 28 July 2016 at 20:16:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
> Well, if we decided to make parens with ref legal, then we 
> could make it work. e.g.
>
> ref(int) function(int, int) functionPointer;
>
> Now, I don't know of any other case where you'd actually use 
> parens with ref if it were legal, but it would solve this 
> particular case if we wanted to provide a way around the 
> ambiguity.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

On a somewhat related tangent, I was looking for the history of 
why ref was included in the language. My recollection of Andrei's 
book is that it just takes ref as a given, instead of pass by 
reference or address in C++, rather than say why that decision 
was made. I found that ref was added in D 1.011 as a replacement 
for inout. Looking through some of the D 1.0 documentation, I see 
that
"C++ does not distinguish between in, out and ref (i.e. inout) 
parameters."
but not much else.