DeRailed DSL (was Re: compile-time regex redux)

[Walter Bright]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> It's mundane in the sense that if we do it right, like the foundation 
>> of a house, nobody will notice it. If we do it wrong, it'll be front 
>> page like the crane that fell over last month and sliced through a 
>> high rise condo.
>>
>> I couldn't be in this business if I didn't enjoy the mundane details <g>.
> 
> It's interesting to me that the features I requested back around DMD 
> 0.135, which made elementary metaprocessing of strings possible, were so 
> mundane  --- "abcd"[2..4] being exactly equivalent to "bc", for example.
> It seems to me that some other languages (*cough* C# *cough*) have tried 
> to reach for the flashy stuff without getting the mundane things right.
> Mundane is good.

Oh, I agree. Making a great product (as Apple demonstrated) is about 
getting the mundane details right.

The only problem is that such details don't make for a great 
presentation. Nobody is going to switch to D because of const. But if 
they do, they'll find it hard to switch away because of const (and 
things like it) <g>.

The flashy stuff, though, is the stuff that piques peoples' interests 
enough to give D a try.