"Programming in D" on Educative.io

[ShadoLight]

On Wednesday, 13 May 2020 at 19:25:43 UTC, welkam wrote:
> On Thursday, 7 May 2020 at 09:18:04 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>> Because D is a re-engineering of C++
>
> I thought it was re-engineering of C

This opinion seems quite common in the D community, but I frankly 
don't see it. If you are referring to the D subset defined by the 
BetterC switch, well, maybe then I would agree. But not for D in 
general.

FFI to C by itself does not make it a "re-engineering of C".

IIRC, Walter wrote somewhere (in the early days of D), that part 
of what inspired D was "wondering what C++ would have looked like 
if it wasn't constrained by backwards compatibility with C".

Or something to that effect. Let's see what the Wayback machine 
has to say:

"D was conceived in December 1999 by myself as a successor to C 
and C++..." [1]

"Many new concepts were added to the language with C++, but 
backwards compatibility with C was maintained, including 
compatibility with nearly all the weaknesses of the original 
design. There have been many attempts to fix those weaknesses, 
but the compatibility issue frustrates it. ..etc.." [2]

It is actually quite interesting to look at the original goals... 
and see where we are now.


[1] 
https://web.archive.org/web/20021205114505/http://digitalmars.com/d/index.html
[2] 
https://web.archive.org/web/20021205114505/http://digitalmars.com/d/index.html