Super-dee-duper D features

[Bill Baxter]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> 4) The more experience I have, the more it seems that the language 
>> that got a lot right is ... Lisp. But Lisp did one thing terribly, 
>> terribly wrong - the syntax. The Lisp experts who can get past that 
>> seem to be amazingly productive with Lisp. The rest of us will remain 
>> envious of what Lisp can do, but will never use it.
>>
>> 5) Lisp gets things right, according to what I've read from heavy Lisp 
>> users, by being a language that can be modified on the fly to suit the 
>> task at hand, in other words, by having a customizable language one 
>> can achieve dramatic productivity gains.
> 
> I suspect: C was a great language because it doesn't try to keep you 
> away from the machine. Lisp is great because it doesn't try to hide you 
> from the compiler.
> 
> To quote Stepanov (the link that Bill Baxter just posted):
> 
> Alexander Stepanov Notes on Programming 10/3/2006
> 
> Since I am strongly convinced that the purpose of the programming 
> language is to present an abstraction of an underlying hardware C++ is 
> my only choice. Sadly enough, most language designers seem to be 
> interested in preventing me from getting to the raw bits and provide a 
> “better” machine than the one inside my computer. Even C++ is in danger 
> of being “managed” into something completely different. (p7)
> 
> Sadly enough, C and C++ not only lack facilities for defining type 
> functions but do not provide most useful type functions for extracting 
> different type attributes that are trivially known to the compiler. It 
> is impossible to find out how many members a type has; it is impossible 
> to find the types of the members of a structure type; it is impossible 
> to find out how many arguments a function takes or their types; it is 
> impossible to know if a function is defined for a type; the list goes on 
> and on. The language does its best to hide the things that the compiler 
> discovers while processing a program.  (pp. 43-44)

Sounds like someone needs to send Alexander Stepanov an invitation to 
join this discussions going on here.  It sounds D's working precisely on 
providing him with everything he ever wanted.

--bb