Paper acknowledges positively D's approach to purity

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>> It's a great honor and validation to be acknowledged in a paper of
>> such quality and to see D's approach to purity not only mentioned,
>> but in praise terms nonetheless (section 9).
> 
> It seems to contain some comments that are not a praise too:
> 
>> While this approach avoids the need to eliminate mutable state and
>> determinism from the global scope, there is a substantial cost in
>> expressivity as it prevents pure functions from making any use of
>> impure functions and methods. The result is essentially of a
>> partition of the program into imperative and purely functional
>> portions, whereas our approach allows pure functions to make full
>> use of the rest of the program, limited only by the references they
>> hold.<

Any paper will mention the disadvantages of related work in the 
pertinent section. I'm not worried about that at all. Their system is 
more expressive but also considerably more complex. That's not 
necessarily bad, it's a different point in tradeoff space.

> Anyway, in Java, Python, and few articles I have read about such
> topics they all talk about immutable objects and variables, I too use
> this term generally. Commonly used (correct) terms are important to
> help people quickly create clear connections between concepts and
> their names, so I think D2 may chose to use a more correct term
> "immutable" to denote that concept. There's time to change terms
> still, not many people are using D2 yet.

I think that's a good point.


Andrei