WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 44449366

(no title)

destructionator | 8 months ago

Just a personal anecdote, Walter Bright's Digital Mars C++ compiler also had the contracts (D started life almost literally as recycled code from Mr. Bright's other compilers - he wrote a native Java compiler, a Javascript 1.3 stdlib, and a C++ compiler with a bunch of extensions.... smash those together and you have the early D releases!).

Anyway, I used the DM C++ compiler originally because it was the only one I could download to the high school computers without filling out a form, and pimply-face youth me saw "DESIGN BY CONTRACT" at the top of the website and got kinda excited thinking it was a way to make some easy money coding online.

Imagine my disappointment when I saw it was just in/out/invariant/assert features. (I'm pretty sure D had just come out when I saw that, but I saw `import` instead of `#include` and dismissed it as a weenie language. Came back a couple years later and cursed my younger self for being a fool! lol)

discuss

order

WalterBright|8 months ago

The in/out features come into their own when inheritance is in play, i.e. for member functions of classes and interfaces. See https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#in_out_inheritance

`import` is so cool we extended it to be able to import .c files! The D compiler internally translates them to D so they can be used. When this was initially proposed, the reaction was "what's that good for?" It turned out to be incredibly useful and a huge time saver.

The concept is sort of like C++ being a superset of C and so being able to incorporate C code, except unlike C++, the C syntax can be left behind. After all, don't we get tired of:

    struct Tag { ... } Tag;

?

1718627440|8 months ago

> struct Tag { ... } Tag;

What's the thing with the syntax? If you don't intend to use the type elsewhere don't give it a tag, if you want, you have to give it a name. (Assuming you are annoyed by the duplicate Tag)