Super-dee-duper D features

[Bill Baxter]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Nicolai Waniek wrote:
>> Let's hope that nobody will "over use" the new language features.
> 
> They will over use them. Overusing them is a part of the process of 
> learning how to program. I remember a professional race car driver 
> telling me once that if the driver didn't walk back to the pits now and 
> then carrying just the steering wheel, he wasn't pushing the limits hard 
> enough.
> 
> But if he did it too often, he'd get fired <g>.
> 
>> As I
>> said (often enough) before, I really like the well though-out examples
>> on how to use the (new) features I don't really like (and I even
>> would've done some things the same way), but I fear the examples that
>> will drive me insane ;)
> 
> I think the best we can do is keep coming up with examples showing the 
> right way to use them - lead by example.
> 
> And we should keep on frowning on attempts to use overloaded << for I/O 
> purposes <g>.

I think Lisp is a pretty good example here.  With all those reader 
macros etc you can really transform the language completely.  But (from 
what I gather) Lispers as a community have declared that to be bad style 
unless there's /really/ no other way to accomplish the desired goal.

(Regular (non-reader) lisp macro's can also be used to transform the 
language and define DSLs -- but there my impression is it's more like 
Henry Ford's "you can have any color you like, as long as it's black". 
With Lisp macros it's "you can create any DSL you like, as long as it 
still looks like fingernail clippings in oatmeal".)

--bb