Super-dee-duper D features

[Bill Baxter]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:


> I'm actually mildly surprised. Lately there was some talk around here 
> about supporting the day-to-day programmers and so on. I find looping a 
> very day-to-day thing, and looping over 2+ things at least a 
> few-days-to-few-days thing. There is a need for parallel iteration, if 
> nothing else shown by the existence of a library that addresses exactly 
> that - to the extent possible in a library that's not in the position to 
> control syntax, scoping, and visibility. I was sure people will be on 
> this one like white on rice. But Bjarne Stroustrup was right: nobody 
> knows what most programmers do :o).

Python and Ruby are hardly considered to be obtuse languages, or 
unfriendly to Joe coder, but both get by just fine without special case 
syntax for iterating over multiple collections, or for iterating in reverse.
    for x,y izip(foo,bar):
        do stuff

    for x reversed(foo):
        do stuff

    for x,y izip(reversed(foo),bar):
        do that with your proposal!

That said, I understand that Python and Ruby have a little more freedom 
to pile up the abstractions because both of them are so friggin slow 
that a few more layers won't hurt anything.  D can't be quite so 
cavalier about tossing performance for elegance.

Still, I'm remain unconvinced that D can't have both performance and 
elegance.

--bb