From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <6333e0a01e113662f55923372089278a@plan9.bell-labs.com>
From: presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] useful language extension, or no?
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Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 13:31:01 -0400
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> You're going to have to do better than that.  Simply
> pulling the 'ole "I'm overly negative and as a result most
> people avoid confrontation with me" isn't going to cut it.
> 

The unnamed types and inheritance are indeed syntactic sugar.  It did have
the useful side effect of reducing typing.  If any of you remember BSD, you'ld
remember cruft like

#define sa_len		sa_union.sa_generic.sa_len2
#define sa_family	sa_union.sa_generic.sa_family2
#define	sa_data		sa_union.sa_generic.sa_data2

from /usr/include/sys/socket to avoid typing infinitely
long names.  The unnamed types saves us a lot more than
a few characters here and there.  It saves us from such
#defines which have a bad habit of getting out of sync
with the things they're working around.

The added inheritance saves a fair amount, though not all,
of the casts and void*'s that we used to live with.  These
blind conversions are very error prone.  I'ld rather the
compiler catch my errors than go at it during run time.

> 
> Anyone else have an opinion on this ... specifically the guys/gals
> at the labs, since without their consent tool changes doubtfully
> become realised?

`atend' does have the advantage of catching some mistakes.  However,
it doesn't really catch any errors that I typically make so I'm
less sanguine about changing the language for it.

> Including tuples (perhaps as an instance of nameless structs) would
> simplify many interfaces, right? that's one thing I learned using
> Limbo.

This I wouldn't mind seeing.  I really miss limbo tuples.  Of course,
I miss garbage collection too.