Thread overview
Standards
May 28, 2002
anderson
May 29, 2002
Pavel Minayev
May 29, 2002
anderson
May 28, 2002
IDEA 1
I just had an idea for the style standards.

I'd be good if there was support for people who take a top-down (or is
bottom-up) approach to coding, where code there ends up being lots of stubs
(empty code areas).

Suggest they put a comment a word like
//STUB
or
//UNDONE

Then the programmer only needs to search for the these keywords.

It'd be one of those standards that won't be kept all the time, but everyone would know what it means when they came across it. I find that a number of error can occur in a large program by forgetting to fill a case statement latter on.

Alternatively, (and I know Walter that you hate warnings), some sort of count of all empty sections this could be done in a pre-phase compiler. And it won't be a warning, you have a message like.

"34 incomplete areas"
And you'd keep working at the program until you'd removed them all, perhaps
a smart IDE could direct you to each one.

This concept probably has been included in some compliers as a warning though.

IDEA 2
On another note,

I'd be nice to be able to deprecated code like in java. Perhaps assertion could be used and paced in the standard.

ie message
"This function as deprecated as of version ... please use ... instead"
or
"This function as deprecated ... please use ... instead"

It'd also be good to have 2 levels of deprecation

One, that allows the use of the old function,
And one that doesn't but reports the error.

But perhaps versioning could do this?

IDEA 3
I'd be nice to be able to include a class one and have the program detect
it.

ie
1. Allow a class data type, that can hold classes

classtype(myclass) identifyer  = subclassofmyclass;

where myclass is a class
classtype is a keyword
subclassofmyclass the name of the subclass of myclass

That way you could simply put all classes into an array and create them on
the fly.
ie

classidentifyerarray[n] identifier = new classidentifyerarray[n];

//But the syntax need work of coarse (because arrays now become confusing)

perhaps
[n]classidentifyerarray identifier = new [n]classidentifyerarray;

2. Allow classes to supply a list of all there sub classes
This would probably be very difficult because there would be a number of
problems, such as how deep to go and which order to list them. I would
suggest having both single and multilevel options.

something like,

classtype(myclass)[] identifier = myclass.children;

(building on 1.)

This would fill an array of all the immediate subclasses in myclass, but that may be impossible with the way the compiler works.

3. Allow some type of class enumeration or contant array

ie

const classtype ClassArray[] =
{
    className,
    className2,
    ect...
}

That way you'd may get rid of some dynamic problems the the previous methods.

4. Fix loadLibary
As you probably know loadLibary is compiler specific for classes. It'd be
really neat to write plugins as classes.

At the moment loadLibary probably won't have problems, but when other compiler based D begin to be build, problems could begin to arrise.

5. Allow virtual static member functions
There are workarounds for static virtual member functions, but why should we
use work arounds?
Virtual Static member functions could do provide workarounds for some of the
topics above as will as meny other things such as maintaining an automatic
individual object count, instead of a global object count for a particular
sub class.

Also I think this would (from my point of view) complete the class
operations.


For example in a drawing package, I have the super class called element. When I want to add a new item such as line, I should be able to simply extend the element class and include "line" the program should detect the new class and included it in the next build (or at runtime). This way you can have many programmers working univocally on many extend components (with pre-define standards in the base class).


I've some other ideas (quite different) on style standards, but I've
forgotten them at present.

I'd like the style standards to be even more detailed, or alternatively have an style advanced standard, because that's when you get to the real time savers.  Styles should help specify how programs are designed (not to reduce alternatives) but to help prevent programmers from doing stupid things (because we're all human - well.. Walter I don't know about, he's a super programmer (just kidding). Some of these things can be included in a compiler, and some of them can't.


I'm glad I got some of that of my chest.

Sorry for the length.



But I'm sure Walter enough of his own ideas to last him a life time.

PS - Are private types virtual ?? why do private types need to be virtual???


May 29, 2002
"anderson" <anderson@firestar.com.au> wrote in message news:ad0qqf$7ki$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> IDEA 2
> On another note,
>
> I'd be nice to be able to deprecated code like in java. Perhaps assertion could be used and paced in the standard.
>
> ie message
> "This function as deprecated as of version ... please use ... instead"
> or
> "This function as deprecated ... please use ... instead"
>
> It'd also be good to have 2 levels of deprecation
>
> One, that allows the use of the old function,
> And one that doesn't but reports the error.

It is possible with the help of "deprecated" keyword (RTFM the section on attributes). The compiler can be tuned to allow deprecated features, or to forbid them.




May 29, 2002
Thanks,

Theres a little bit of new stuff to learn.

"Pavel Minayev" <evilone@omen.ru> wrote in message news:ad1r4j$2hjh$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> "anderson" <anderson@firestar.com.au> wrote in message news:ad0qqf$7ki$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> > IDEA 2
> > On another note,
> >
> > I'd be nice to be able to deprecated code like in java. Perhaps
assertion
> > could be used and paced in the standard.
> >
> > ie message
> > "This function as deprecated as of version ... please use ... instead"
> > or
> > "This function as deprecated ... please use ... instead"
> >
> > It'd also be good to have 2 levels of deprecation
> >
> > One, that allows the use of the old function,
> > And one that doesn't but reports the error.
>
> It is possible with the help of "deprecated" keyword (RTFM the section on attributes). The compiler can be tuned to allow deprecated features, or to forbid them.
>
>
>
>