Re: [9fans] useful language extension, or no?

[Sam <sah@softcardsystems.com>]

Ok, I'll bite and play devil's advocate.

What about the promotion of a structure from itself
to one of its members in a function call simply because
it makes locking a structure easier?  Surely passing in
a pointer to a function and having the in-func pointer completely
different violates some standard of programming languages.

Why was it worthwhile to change the language in this respect,
for the idiom of "always having to make sure the lock is the
first item in the structure for pointer coersion is a pain?"

Sam

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, rob pike,
esq. wrote:

> > Suppose I'm not saying "why," but "why not."  IMO it's cleaner and
> > quite possibly more efficient (without getting into a usec argument,
> > please).  Do you disagree?
>
> Yes.  The benefit is minor, too small to justify changing the language.
> You're trying to formalize an idiom; just using the idiom suits me fine.
>
> The type inclusion feature, I think, did a lot more, since it trigged type
> conversion and promotion: a much bigger deal.
>
> -rob
>