suggested improvements to D

[BCS]

Reply to Warren,

> Unfortunately the response to my "suggested improvements to D," oddly,
> was not uniformly "of course we'll do that immediately."
> 
> Let me reiterate my case.  First, D'ers have already agreed by
> consensus to add  IEEE-float hooks to handle NaNs, rounding, etc.
> Good.  That means you already have admitted you agree with my 
> philosophy that the language must provide the underlying power 
> of the machine (for any feature that a large number of machine 
> hardwares now supply) to the user. Not deny it.

No it dose not. 

> OK?  There is no question.  D'ers already agreed on this philosophy.

This whole thread isn't based on the basic philosophy of D, so I claim that 
the above is in serious question. (more on this later)

> And that means you agree this has to be done even if the syntax
> for it might be a little messy. [Which doesn't matter because these
> things are used fairly rarely.]
> Good.  I'm glad we are in agreement. 

We are? Starting when? I must have missed that meeting.

[...]
> finally, the designers of a language are not intentionally trying
> to hurt people.
> Won't that be nice?

Only BF, whitespace, intercal and friends TRY to hurt programmers.

> it'd be a pity to see D fall into the same pit of stupidity as all the
> others about such an embarrassingly trivial task as providing a few
> builtin inline functions.)

Firstly, ANY change to the core of a language is by definition non trivial. 
A better solution is intrinsics, particularly if (in the ops using carry) 
they take the forms: void adc(uint* a, uint* b, uint* sum, uint count)

As to you claims that not adding these features is counter to the D philosophy, 
I have written my take on the D philosophy in a paper (link below) and I 
don't think your claim has support. If I have a erroneous opinion, I would 
hope some of the long timers would correct me, or if you think that what 
you are advocating /does/ fall under my opinion of the D philosophy I would 
entertain you thoughts.

http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~shro8822/term_010.pdf
Note: this paper is still in progress.

BCS

> wds
>