On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 20:43:24 UTC, Mason McGill wrote:
On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 18:47:49 UTC, Pedro Larroy wrote:
Hi
As a newcomer to D, I wonder, how difficult would be and would
it be welcome by the D community to have D's syntax with
significant whitespace and without brackets more like python?
Thanks.
What draws you to D, if not the syntax?
Definitely not the syntax!
The promise of a relatively high level statically typed language
with low level control and C/C++ levels of performance. That's
what I'm looking for with D. I choke down the syntax, telling
myself "at least it's better than C++".
If you're looking for a fast, Python-like language, and you
don't mind dependence on the CPython runtime, I'd suggest
looking into Cython (http://cython.org/).
If you're interested in modern language features and expressive
metaprogramming with a Python-like syntax, I'd recommend Julia
(http://julialang.org/).
You're wrong about Julia. The syntax is most reminiscent of
MATLAB and Octave.
Others are wrong comparing Ruby/Perl/whatever to Python, at least
the syntax.
I find Python syntax very readable, it's the type system and
semantics of Python that I dislike.
Closest language to D with a Pythonesque syntax is Nimrod,
nimrod-lang.org
It's author, Araq, sometimes reads this forum.
I believe that Haskell is the most popular statically typed
language with indentation sensitive syntax. But Haskell is a lazy
functional language where programming with side effects is more
difficult. That's not like D.
I doubt there's much interest in a new syntax for D. You may as
well find or create a different language if it bothers you. I
empathize, but I'm certain you'd be better off just getting used
to the existing D syntax.
