On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this
question. The idea was which features in D are redundant and/or
do not add significant value?
A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat,
cdouble and creal types.
What's your list?
D has a lot of ad-hock features which make the language
needlessly large and complex. I'd strive to replace these with
better general purpose mechanisms.
My list:
* I'd start with getting rid of foreach completely. (not just
foreach_reverse). This is nothing more than a fancy function with
a delegate parameter.
* enum - enum should be completely redesigned to only implement
what it's named after: enumerations.
* version - this does not belong in a programming language. Git
is a much better solution.
* di files - a library should encapsulate all the info required
to use it. Java Jars, .Net assemblies and even old school; Pascal
units all solved this long ago.
* This is a big one: get rid of *all* current compile time
special syntax. It should be replaced by a standard compilation
API and the compiler should be able to use plugins/addons. This
would reduce the size of the language to half of its current
size, maybe even more.
