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https://forum.dlang.org/post/ssqeqbnesbiostjrnxrf@forum.dlang.org
On Wednesday, 29 November 2023 at 14:56:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>I don’t know how many times I get caught with size_t indexes but I want them to be int or uint. It’s especially painful in my class that I’m teaching where I don’t want to yet explain why int doesn’t work there and have to introduce casting or use to!int. All for the possibility that I have an array larger than 2 billion elements.
-Steve
If I can only have one or the other, I would choose to enforce the cast. However, that is really annoying and not intuitive for newcomers. The strictness is one of the things I really value in D but I have also really hated along the way. I remember trying to figure out how to cast a mutable variable to immutable for the first time. I know it's immutable, just let me cast it! I appreciate it now. Even once I fixed it, I didn't know why.
Anyway, I would be interested to see a list of the issues your students run into and if there is enough there that D could add a --simple or --beginner flag or something that allows you to hang yourself on the common beginner issues by just emitting a warning.
