• =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Adam_Cig=E1nek?= (23/23) Nov 01 2010 Hello,
• Stewart Gordon (16/30) Nov 01 2010

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Adam_Cig=E1nek?= <adam.ciganek gmail.com> writes:

Hello,

why is the following code illegal?


  import std.stdio;

  void delegate() fun;

  void capture(lazy void f) {
    fun = &f;
  }

  void main() {
    capture(writeln("hello"));
    fun();
  }


It says "Error: lazy variables cannot be lvalues", pointing to the
"fun = &f" line.

It can be worked around by rewriting it like this:

void capture(lazy void f) {
  fun = delegate void() { f(); };
}

So it's not big deal, just a minor inconvenience. But still, why is it
illegal? According to the docs
(http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/lazy-evaluation.html), lazy
expressions are implicitly converted to delegates, so it seems to me
that it should work.

adam.

Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 yahoo.com> writes:

On 01/11/2010 15:57, Adam Cigánek wrote:
<snip>
    void capture(lazy void f) {
      fun =&f;
    }

<snip>
 It says "Error: lazy variables cannot be lvalues", pointing to the
 "fun =&f" line.

Because f doesn't have an address.  It's just an expression that's 
evaluated where it's used.  It's true that the function in which the 
compiler wraps f has an address, but that isn't the same.

 It can be worked around by rewriting it like this:

 void capture(lazy void f) {
    fun = delegate void() { f(); };
 }

 So it's not big deal, just a minor inconvenience. But still, why is it
 illegal? According to the docs
 (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/lazy-evaluation.html), lazy
 expressions are implicitly converted to delegates, so it seems to me
 that it should work.

This is inaccurate or at least badly worded.  What's really meant is 
that the compiler converts the lazy expression to a delegate. 
Unfortunately, there's no way at the moment to extract that delegate, 
though I do wish D explicitly supported & as a way of doing it.

There's a workaround: declaring the function instead as

     void capture(void delegate()[1] f...)

which is the special case given on
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/function.html
under "Lazy Variadic Functions".

Stewart.