On 31 March 2014 17:28, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

On 3/30/2014 8:32 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:

On Monday, 31 March 2014 at 03:25:11 UTC, Manu wrote:

I also feel quite dirty using pointers in D where there is a dedicated
reference type available. I don't want * and & to appear everywhere in my D code.

structs can pretty easily be reference types too:

Or just:

alias S* C;

Voila! Use C as the type instead of S*. The reason this works out so well in D is because C.member works (no need to use -> )

Now it's deceptive that it's a pointer, and the pointer semantics are not suppressed. It might be surprising to find that a type that doesn't look like a pointer behaves like a pointer.

You lose access to the operators, indexing/slicing etc, etc.

I don't see how this is a reasonable comparison to 'class' as a reference type by definition.