On 06/07/2010 12:57 PM, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article
D is an extremely powerful language, but when I read complaints and sighs about
other languages, few seem to know that these problems are solved with D.
Essentially, we have a marketing problem.
One great way to address it is by writing articles about various aspects of D
and how they solve problems, like
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cb14j/compiletime_function_execution_in_d/
which was well received on reddit.
Anyone have good ideas on topics for D articles? And anyone want to stand up and
write an article?
They don't have to be comprehensive articles (though of course those are
better), even blog entries will do.
This probably won't be replied to because I'm starting a new sub-thread in a
mature discussion, but I wonder if we could write about the advantages and
disadvantages of duck typing vs. static typing, comparing Python vs. Java at
first, then bring D into the picture to show how, to a greater extent than C++
templates or C#/Java generics, it solves may of the problems of static typing
without introducing the pitfalls of duck typing.
Here's a simple example of something that would be awkward to impossible to do
efficiently in any other language:
/**Finds the largest element present in any of the ranges passed in.\
*/
CommonType!(staticMap!(ElementType, T)) largestElement(T...)(T args) {
// Quick and dirty impl ignoring error checking:
typeof(return) ret = args[0].front();
foreach(arg; args) {
foreach(elem; arg) {
ret = max(elem, ret);
}
}
return ret;
}
Do this in C++ -> FAIL because there are no variadics. (Yes, C++1x will have
them, but I might die of old age by the time C++1x exists.)
Do this in any dynamic language -> FAIL because looping is so slow that you
might
die of old age before it executes. Besides, who wants to do computationally
intensive, multithreaded work in a dynamic language?
In python: max (map (max, args)) should have reasonable
performances and is *much* more elegant...
I very much doubt that.
Andrei
