Re: [Vala] wish for Type Inference working for weak local variables

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 16:20 +0200, Jiří Zárevúcky wrote:
> Yet, I'm kinda wondering about one thing. It seems to me some people 
> were, are and will be wanting inference for weak variables, regardless 
> the real benefits may be negligible. Even if it were just to have nice C 
> code where the reffing is not needed. Still, every time the question 
> comes up, people will spend much more time arguing the insignificance 
> then it would take to actually implement it... Quite

I hope you do understand that language design is not about how to add as
many features as possible as quickly as possible. Every syntax addition
has its merits and its drawbacks for both, users and implementors of the
language. Adding syntactic sugar just because you can is not the right
decision.

If you make something more prominent in the language by adding syntactic
sugar, you imply that you're encouraging its use and therefore also
require that more users of the language should be able to understand it.
If you do this for functionality that should only be used rarely, people
will use it in situations where they shouldn't, which will lead to more
bugs and confusion as, for example, dangling pointers and crashes.

Jürg