DMD 0.165 release

Tony ignorethis at nowhere.com
Mon Aug 21 05:05:26 PDT 2006


"Walter Bright" <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:ecbodc$1v70$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> Don Clugston wrote:
>> * Together with lambda delegate type inference, it seems that delegates 
>> are becoming the central language idiom of D. It's not just an improved 
>> C++ any more, I think a whole new programming style is developing.
>
> Inner classes, nested functions, delegates, and closures are all closely 
> related. The only thing missing in D is the full generality of closures; 
> once we have that I think D can do what Lisp does, but with a much more 
> palatable syntax.

I think serious Lispniks would disagree with the above statement (I'm not 
one of them by the way).



However, I find it really encouraging that you are comparing D with Lisp and 
obviously gaining some important insights into language design as a result. 
I was concerned that your goal was to create a better C++, rather than a 
better LANGUAGE, but this is obviously not the case anymore (if it ever 
was).



One advantage of Lisp (which is not present in D) is Lisps removal of the 
artificial boundary between compile time and runtime capabilities.  Put 
another way, because code and data share a common form in Lisp (the list, 
which is in fact a form of parse tree), Lisp provides easy access to runtime 
code generation.



 I'm at a loss as to how a similar capability could be made available in D. 
However, if this were possible then I believe you would have created 
something truly revolutionary.



D really has become a very interesting language.  Thankyou Walter.



Tony

Melbourne, Australia

 tonys  -  mailbox  at  hotmail.com





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