First Draft: cast(ref T)... as shorthand for *cast(T*)&...

[Walter Bright]

On 1/20/2025 7:43 PM, Paul Backus wrote:
> Would you be open to using a helper function if it had a shorter, less ugly name?

The shorter the name, and the less ugly it is, the more it risks breaking code. 
Overloading keywords is commonplace in languages, and D, to avoid that problem.

Consider the builtin associative arrays. These have been a big success. All 
attempts at making it a template foundered on it being less convenient to use.

One of the problems of relying on templates for basic things is they aren't in 
the language specification, so people don't realize they are there.

P.S. AliasSeq also impairs the use of tuples.