new domain: d-programming-language.org

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Stewart Gordon wrote:
>> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> I've just registered it, so it can be the 'official' D site.
>>>>
>>> Cool.
>>>
>>> Is it now finally possible to _officially_ list proposed language
>>> features before they get implemented in DMD?
>> <snip>
>>
>> Why not use Bugzilla for this?
>>
>> A lot of projects that use Bugzilla welcome feature requests through
>> it, including all Mozilla projects.  It's why there's an 'enhancement'
>> severity level.
> 
> Walter said that it was an inappropriate forum for discussions about
> language features, and I agree with that (language features almost
> always require far more discussion than a browser feature). But I think
> it makes a lot of sense to put enhancements in Bugzilla once Walter has
> given an indication that he'll probably implement it. (I just did that
> for what I think is the only proposal I've made that falls into that
> category).
> 95% of proposals don't get any response from Walter, so I don't think
> they belong in Bugzilla. It might make sense to revive that Wiki page
> for them, though.
> 
> Other enhancements which seem to have been approved:
> * array literals (for DMD 2.0).
> * array expressions (for DMD 2.0).
> * new 'auto' syntax for allocating classes on the stack.
> * coroutines (for DMD 2.0)
> * combining function pointers and delegates (for DMD 2.0).
> 
> Can anyone think of any more?
> 
> It might make sense to create a DMD2.0 product in Bugzilla to put those
> into.

What I meant was that why doesn't Walter want to document approved
future language features before implementing them. It would be a lot
easier for other frontend writers to create patches / own
implementations if there was some documentary in the first place. Walter
could even tag them with something like "[not implemented yet, will be
implemented in DMD 1.5 or 2.0]". The Future-link in digitalmars-site is
badly outdated and inadequate. The bugzilla isn't good for describing
the syntax or features in a verbose manner.

I know there are proposals in bugzilla and in the newsgroups. The
problem is that these are not official in any way. We don't know, what
would the final implementation be. I bet it would accelerate the
development of D as a language if there were some centralized guidelines
somewhere. It would also eliminate some missteps like builtin regexps or
bit arrays if we could see them syntactically before they are in the
"production" version. I don't know how Walter sees this, but IMHO
writing few pages of text in a natural language is a lot less time
consuming than writing them as a code to the compiler. And you have to
write those damn docs anyway sooner or later.

-- 
Jari-Matti