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

[Jiří Zárevúcky <zarevucky jiri gmail com>]

On 08/03/2009 12:34 AM, Jürg Billeter wrote:
> 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
>
>    

When you put it this way, I see what you mean. Sorry for making so much 
fuss.