Andrei Alexandrescu: Thank you for your answers.
>To be brutally honest, I think many features discussed here are completely >missing the point.< I know, most of the things I say are wrong or useless. I am not good at all. Yet, no one is perfect, and in the past I/we have discussed about several things that are badly designed in D. >Only a couple of posts ago, there were suggestions for alternate syntaxes for >"with" that were not only useless, they added new keywords like they were up >for grabs. If somebody wants to make "as" into a keyword, I'm liable to go >postal.< That was me, and it was not a much serious proposal (I was not sure in the first place). But sometimes I don't like how much D relies on punctuation (like the semicolon in the middle of foreach). When I see a syntax like: alias foo bar; I often have troubles understanding if the new name is bar or foo. A syntax like: alias foo as bar; Is less ambigous. Now feel free to go postal :-) I have even troubles to remember if in the following syntax n is the number of rows or the number of columns: auto mat = new[][](n, m); Maybe I'm just dumb :-) >My perception is that the recently-added features are of good quality.< This is probably thank to you too, because now there are two people designing things instead of just one. > It looks and is a million times worse. If you know D1 and see > case 'a': .. case 'z': > you pretty sure know exactly what's going on. If you know D1 but haven't been illuminated by the likes of Ruby and Chapel and see: > case 'a' .. #'z': > you're like, what the heck were they thinking about when they designed this > ass-backward syntax? The problem with a syntax like: case 'a': .. case 'z': Is that it's not general enough. The language clearly needs a syntax to specify ranges, both closed and open, that can iterated on, that support opIn_r, that can lazily iterated, that have a length, etc. Using a .. syntax inside the foreach, and another .. syntax inside the switch, and defining iota() into the std lib, doesn't like a good idea to me. It howls for a general language-wide solution. Bye, bearophile
