On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:02:38 +0000, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:

> I really think users should learn the language more than the library....

hear, hear!

On 3/16/2015 3:49 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> hexString just being there accessible for inspection is a good argument for its
> existence. People can use it as inspiration for their own abstractions. -- Andrei

That's right. Being able to read in custom-formatted data into compile time literals is a big deal.

It's a lot better than the way idgen.d (dmd compiler source) works.

"Nick Treleaven"  wrote in message news:me6jo4$ca$1@digitalmars.com...

> 0b1010 binary literals (even though C++11 supports them)
> 0xABCD hex literals (but useful for porting C)

You can take them when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.  These are 1000x times more useful than octal and deserve to be built in. 

On 3/16/15 6:45 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Nick Treleaven"  wrote in message news:me6jo4$ca$1@digitalmars.com...
>
>> 0b1010 binary literals (even though C++11 supports them)
>> 0xABCD hex literals (but useful for porting C)
>
> You can take them when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.  These are
> 1000x times more useful than octal and deserve to be built in.

Agreed.

On a higher level: there's no subset of the language that's at the same time sufficiently complex and sufficiently obscure to make its removal a net positive.


Andrei

"Andrei Alexandrescu"  wrote in message news:me870h$1fnc$1@digitalmars.com...

> On a higher level: there's no subset of the language that's at the same time sufficiently complex and sufficiently obscure to make its removal a net positive.

Associative arrays come close, but only because of their insanely high complexity.  Complex numbers are another one, although they can be safely ignored most of the time. 

On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 12:53:24 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
> 0b1010 binary literals (even though C++11 supports them)
> 0xABCD hex literals (but useful for porting C)

And while we're at it, why not remove those pesky base-10
literals as well? Shouldn't be too hard to write dec!"123456"
instead of 123456. :p

On 17/03/2015 01:45, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Nick Treleaven"  wrote in message news:me6jo4$ca$1@digitalmars.com...
>
>> 0b1010 binary literals (even though C++11 supports them)
>> 0xABCD hex literals (but useful for porting C)
>
> You can take them when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.  These are
> 1000x times more useful than octal and deserve to be built in.

Agreed they are more useful, but that does not necessarily mean they should be built-in.

On 17/03/2015 11:34, Biotronic wrote:
> On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 12:53:24 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
>> 0b1010 binary literals (even though C++11 supports them)
>> 0xABCD hex literals (but useful for porting C)
>
> And while we're at it, why not remove those pesky base-10
> literals as well? Shouldn't be too hard to write dec!"123456"
> instead of 123456. :p

Because all programming languages support integer literals.

On 17/03/2015 03:28, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On a higher level: there's no subset of the language that's at the same
> time sufficiently complex and sufficiently obscure to make its removal a
> net positive.

q"" delimited strings. No one uses them (used once in all of Phobos). They are obscure and add some complexity to lexing D.

"Nick Treleaven"  wrote in message news:me950a$2boc$1@digitalmars.com...

> On 17/03/2015 03:28, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > On a higher level: there's no subset of the language that's at the same
> > time sufficiently complex and sufficiently obscure to make its removal a
> > net positive.
>
> q"" delimited strings. No one uses them (used once in all of Phobos). They are obscure and add some complexity to lexing D.

They don't have a high complexity though, and that's the point.  The amount of code in the compiler to support them is trivial.