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Comment by tialaramex

Product of the creator's will. Andrew is confident that always rejecting programs with unused variables catches bugs, and he believes that if you don't like this you should have software to adapt the Zig you write so that it compiles, by adding or removing _ = unused_variable; style statements to consume the otherwise unused variables.

There can be a benefit to a singular coherent vision behind something - committees can produce languages which don't do anything well by compromising everywhere - but one of the negatives of visionaries is that they can stubbornly stick to their preferences overriding any other consideration. Andrew is quite sure he's right, nothing will overcome that.

It's OK, C++ manages to suffer from afflictions of a single coherent vision (Bjarne Stroustrup's) and having an unwieldy committee structure (WG21 the "C++ Standards Committee") and despite the resulting flaws it was enormously successful.

parent tialaramex 3 years ago

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