Evolving the D Language

[Nick Treleaven]

On Sunday, 9 July 2023 at 18:51:01 UTC, IchorDev wrote:
> On Friday, 7 July 2023 at 13:19:51 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
>> Changing the syntax just for an obsolete feature would send 
>> the wrong message.
>> [...]
>> cent and ucent are already an error as of 2.100. Were they 
>> even implemented?
>
> Clearly you're not looking at this the same way as me, [or 
> Walter](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15393).
> Fixing old code isn't the only upside to resurrecting old 
> features.

I thought Walter was asking for features that should be changed 
from deprecated to obsolete, it seems I was wrong.

> First thing, I think all languages should support binary, 
> octal, decimal and hexadecimal literals as a baseline. Octal is 
> probably the least important of them, but can still be plenty 
> useful in its own right.

Generally programmers can count in binary and decimal, hex 
somewhat. Not octal.

> You technically don't need *any* numerical literals at all in 
> D, you could make all of them with string-to-number templates. 
> You could take such an approach to just about everything in D, 
> actually! On the other hand, people working on low-level Linux 
> code might be pretty appalled to find out that they can't 
> simply use octal literals to represent file permissions in D.

Maybe because they're used to working in languages that don't 
have D's CTFE abilities. Octals are still rare. There are other 
literals, not all literals can be supported in the language. So 
the better solution for less common literals is to embrace the 
library pattern and dogfood it. C++ has user-defined literal 
support. D doesn't need that.

...
> There are a few D features that were poorly implemented (or not 
> implemented at all), and then simply removed instead of being 
> fully reconsidered. You might say that for many, they were 
> indeed reconsidered, and then added to Phobos instead. Now some 
> of these features pre-date BetterC, of course, but I am a 
> regular BetterC user. A feature being moved to Phobos 
> translates to "you don't get to use this in most of your code 
> anymore" for me.

`octal` could have been added to druntime, or you can copy the 
code. For betterC there's probably quite a lot of stuff in Phobos 
that works with betterC, so that is a general problem.

> I'm not a user of complex or imaginary types, but I don't see 
> why they needed to be removed from D, were they a huge burden 
> to maintain compared to being in Phobos?

It depends whether you value language simplification and 
dogfooding.