Overloading/Inheritance issue

[Walter Bright]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I appreciate that you can write tools to analyze it. I think they help 
>> a lot in writing the code, but I don't think they are as helpful for 
>> auditing (code review).
>>
> 
> Auditing, as in someone review someone else's code?

Yes. This is done a lot in professional programming environments, and in 
particular in cases where high reliability/security is needed. C++ is a 
very expensive language to audit because of, for example, the nearly 
nonexistent modularity.

> Well, yes, in that 
> case that tool functionality wouldn't be that useful (although other 
> functionalities might be), however, auditing is a very specific 
> situation, as well has it has lots of other difficulties which aren't 
> easy to handle.

I think that when a language is more auditable, it is more attractive 
for uses that demand high reliability or security. Auditability has 
definitely been a goal of D since the beginning. I've worked with 
programmers from the corporate Java world who have told me about 
auditability problems with Java that makes their life much more difficult.

>> Another problem with them is they are not part of the D compiler 
>> itself, and in my experience add on tools rarely get used, no matter 
>> how useful they are.
> 
> "rarely used"?? Wait, what do you mean "add-on tools"? That 
> functionality is part of JDT (the best (non-commercial) and most popular 
> Java IDE), and similar functionality exists in other IDEs for other 
> languages, so it's quite the opposite of rarely used.

Let me put it another way. How many people use a profiler? coverage 
analyser? Those tools are built-in, are extremely useful, yet are still 
rarely used.