On 29-04-2012 01:25, foobar wrote:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:43:38 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 04/28/2012 09:58 PM, foobar wrote:
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).
foreach is very useful. Have you actually used D?
I have used D and didn't claim that foreach isn't useful.
What I said that is that it belongs in the library, NOT the language.
Yeah, we tried that in C++. It sucked.
The reason it works for many functional languages is that they have even
more terse syntax than D. It would suck to make foreach a function in D.
This is nothing more than a fancy function with
a delegate parameter.
That would be opApply.
Indeed but I'd go even further by integrating it with ranges so that
ranges would provide an opApply like method e.g.
auto r = BinaryTree!T.preOrder(); // returns range
r.each( (T elem) { ...use elem...}); // each method a-la Ruby
* enum - enum should be completely redesigned to only implement
what it's named after: enumerations.
What is the benefit?
On the one hand the current enum for manifest constants is a hack due to
weaknesses of the toolchain and on the other hand it doesn't provide
properly encapsulated enums such as for instance the Java 5.0 ones or
the functional kind.
* version - this does not belong in a programming language. Git
is a much better solution.
So you'd maintain a git branch for every OS if there is some small
part that is OS-dependent? I don't think that is a better approach at
all.
It is far better than having a pile of #ifdef styled spaghetti code.
I'd expect to have all the OS specific code encapsulated separately anyway,
not spread around the code base. Which is the current recommended way of
using
versions anyway. The inevitable conclusion would be to either use a
version management system like git or have separate implementation
modules for platform specific code and use the build tool to implement
the logic of select the modules to include in the build.
Yeah, we tried that in C and C++. It sucked. See: Autotools.
* 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.
What would that be exactly?
This includes __traits, templates, static ifs, etc..
It should be replaced by a standard compilation
API and the compiler should be able to use plugins/addons.
Are you serious?
No I'm joking.
The current system is a pile of hacks on top of the broken model of c++
templates.
I should be able to use a *very* minimalistic system to write completely
_regular_ D code and run it at different times. This is a simple matter
of separation of concerns: what we want to execute (what code) is
separate to the concern of when we want to execute it.
This would reduce the size of the language to half of its current
size, maybe even more.
I am certain that it would not.
You missed to present the 'general purpose mechanisms'.
--
- Alex
