On Friday, 17 June 2022 at 06:18:30 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

According to Walter in last DConf online ImportC is supposed to be compiler-specific thing, not part of the language. Of course this means it's description should not be in the spec. It belongs to the dmd manual.

here, well not quite but kind of. The attribute itself is not part of that DIP but at least it describes an important part of @live.

But I get your point, that the language maintainers have not always gone through the DIP process when adding new functionality. IMO it should not be a requirement for them to do so when there is no reason to, but it should be the standard procedure when designing something major. I share your viewpoint that Walter has sometimes cowboyed past the process (or tried to) when it'd been better to write a DIP or at least discuss the issue before acting. His track record is not all bad though. The bottom type DIP Walter submitted was rejected, but a revision of that by Dennis was later accepted.

On Saturday, 18 June 2022 at 07:46:27 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

It is breaks with the conventions for «class private». Most, if not all, class-based languages have OOP as a feature and not a paradigm. The inventors stressed that OOP was not a paradigm.

On Saturday, 18 June 2022 at 07:53:52 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

I mean, I think it's important in this case because aiui private is ignored in modules because modules are the more central unit of abstraction than classes; a function in a module is "on the same level" as a method in the class. So in that specific sense, it's more correct to call D a module-based language than a class-based one.

Aside: that's actually important if you consider that certain features do not work with class methods!

On Saturday, 18 June 2022 at 05:14:20 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:

Is there for D; do you mean D! I think D Programming Language is consistent. Even from Walter's example I see no problem?

void main()
{
  for (int i = 1; i; --i)
  {
       //assert(i != 1); // error in loop block
  }
  // Equivalent:
  size_t singleLoopError = 1;
  do
  {
    assert(singleLoopError != 1);
  } while (--singleLoopError);
}

SDB@79

On Saturday, 18 June 2022 at 08:49:30 UTC, Salih Dincer wrote:

D supports this or the for (i = 0; i; i++) variant. Walter's example has a semicolon before the brace - that is an error as it's easy not to notice it!

On Saturday, 18 June 2022 at 08:04:55 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

I guess I understand what you mean, you can technically use a module as a singleton, but I would claim that modules primarily are namespaces.

But it is a fact that it is very unusual to provide many access control mechanisms, but not class-private. Even Python, that provides no access control, does at least do name mangling for class private fields. So being surprised about this is warranted.

(Not suggesting this is a pressing issue for D, as things like getting better memory management is much more important.)