• bearophile (5/5) Jul 06 2010 You have a "tupleof" struct attribute that gives a TypeTuple, and it can...
• retard (6/24) Jul 10 2010 I'm afraid the tuple thing won't change anymore. The topic is a bit

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

You have a "tupleof" struct attribute that gives a TypeTuple, and it can
contain values too and not just types, and then you have a Tuple in Phobos that
is something similar, but not exactly the same as, a TypeTuple. You can return
a Tuple but not a TypeTuple. All this is messy, D newbies will have troubles.
Having two slightly different kinds of tuples in a language is bad, but mixing
their names in those ways is even worse.

In my dlibs1 what's called Tuple is named Record and what's named TypeTuple is
named Tuple, this is better because a record is quite similar to a struct (as
named in Pascal-like languages too), while a Tuple is named tuple in the
language too.  The name "Record" is bad for this purpose because while it's
structurally a struct, from an usage point of view it's more like a
mathematical tuple.

In the end I still think "Record" and "Tuple" are better names, despite their
faults. Please think of the newbies :-) Can those two names in Phobos2 be
changed?

Bye,
bearophile

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:58:05 -0400, bearophile wrote:

 You have a "tupleof" struct attribute that gives a TypeTuple, and it can
 contain values too and not just types, and then you have a Tuple in
 Phobos that is something similar, but not exactly the same as, a
 TypeTuple. You can return a Tuple but not a TypeTuple. All this is
 messy, D newbies will have troubles. Having two slightly different kinds
 of tuples in a language is bad, but mixing their names in those ways is
 even worse.
 
 In my dlibs1 what's called Tuple is named Record and what's named
 TypeTuple is named Tuple, this is better because a record is quite
 similar to a struct (as named in Pascal-like languages too), while a
 Tuple is named tuple in the language too.  The name "Record" is bad for
 this purpose because while it's structurally a struct, from an usage
 point of view it's more like a mathematical tuple.
 
 In the end I still think "Record" and "Tuple" are better names, despite
 their faults. Please think of the newbies :-) Can those two names in
 Phobos2 be changed?

I'm afraid the tuple thing won't change anymore. The topic is a bit 
inflammable in any case. To begin with, the tupleof doesn't even 
necessary return well-typed tuples. And even though

$ strings /path/to/bin/dmd |grep -i tuple

returns matches, they say D doesn't have built-in tuples.