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pjmlp | on: The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
They did in C, from one of the language authors even, and it was not accepted.

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/varar...

By the way, both Extended Pascal, Mesa/Cedar and Modula-2 have them, under the name of open arrays.

Basically it took Go, C# and others for C++ to finally get its span.

C probably never will.

spacechild1 | parent
Everybody knows that C++ did not invent the concept of spans and that it was late to the party. It doesn’t change the fact that (presumably) nobody made a proposal to the C++ standard.
tialaramex | root | parent | next
> It doesn’t change the fact that (presumably) nobody made a proposal to the C++ standard.

There were proposals about this for many years. C++ is just a terrible programming language, standardized by a committee (WG21) which exists in large part to boost the ego of one man, Bjarne Stroustrup.

N3851 for example wants to name this idea "array_view" which like "string_view" is an impressively unwieldy name for a core language feature, because of course neither of these were actually proposed as core language features even though that's what they naturally should be -- but it is basically the slice type or as you (and modern C++) call it a "span".

It's true that you can't change facts but what you've got here was a belief which was unfounded, not a fact.

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pjmlp | root | parent
Microsoft made the proposal for C++, after Midori project, and Office security improvements.

Which by your comment, you have no clue about how it came to be.

Proposal is linked in another comment of mine.

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