Coolest D features

[Sean Kelly]

Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I think the problem is that Java is just lacking in some needed 
>> features - like a full set of basic types, simple aggregates, out 
>> parameters, etc. The alternatives are computationally expensive, and 
>> so the optimizer has a lot of work to do to reverse engineer them and 
>> figure out that all the programmer was doing was a workaround for a 
>> POD stack aggregate.
> 
> Could you expand on the above items?  What basic types are missing? Does 
> a "simple aggregate" refer to structs/tuples?  What does POD stand for, 
> and what is a POD stack aggregate?

POD = Plain Old Data.  In D, a struct is a POD stack aggregate.  And I'm 
not sure what Walter meant about basic types, but I've been occasionally 
annoyed at the lack of unsigned primitives in Java.  The out parameter 
issue (or a lack of tuples) is another one.  It's really not uncommon to 
want to return/alter two values in a function call, particularly in the 
case of recursion.  That said, it's obviously possible to re-engineer a 
design to account for this, but the elegant approach often seems to 
sacrifice some degree of efficiency.


Sean