On 20.03.2012 21:33, Don wrote:
On 20.03.2012 20:02, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I plan to give a talk at Lang.NEXT
(http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012) with the
subject above. There are a few features of D that turned out to be
successful, in spite of them being seemingly unimportant or diverging
from related consecrated approaches.
What are your faves? I have a few in mind, but wouldn't want to
influence answers.
Thanks,
Andrei
There's one huge one.
Strings as built-in types, including concatenation and slicing. This
meant that they could be constant-folded. Together with 'static if',
this was the basis of metaprogramming in D. Pretty much all the rest was
a natural consequence of that foundation.
It was *completely* unexpected. When, as a D newbie, I posted some of my
initial exploration of the language, Walter wrote "I had no idea this
was even possible."
Probably not what you have in mind, though -- it *was* expected to be a
success, just not to anything like this extent.
* pragma(msg) is something that's been used 100X as often as anticipated.
Note that because it was so successful, it was incorporated into static
assert.
* Builtin properties of types, eg int.max. Doesn't sound like much of an
improvement over a header file of constants, but it's had a huge impact.
It really encourages you to write correct code, (I especially notice it
for floating point, but I bet if you grep for "int.max" in D code,
you'll get far more hits than for "MAXINT" in C code).
And is(typeof()), even though the syntax is really horrible. Brilliant
concept.
