DMD 0.165 release

[Walter Bright]

Tony wrote:
> "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).

Of course they would <g>.


> 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).

What catches my interest about Lisp are the folks (like Paul Graham) who 
claim huge productivity gains from it. Despite such, however, Lisp has 
failed to gain mainstream acceptance. Maybe D could adopt some of the 
things that make Lisp so productive, and leave behind the stuff that 
inhibits Lisp from getting traction.

defmac is often trotted out as a big productivity gainer in Lisp, 
because with it one can define one's own syntax. D's lazy evaluation 
does the equivalent.

> 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.

I think that would be D 3.0 <g>.

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

You're welcome.