D const design rationale

[Walter Bright]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> No, FORTRAN does not have array operations out of the box. It has no 
>> more mathematical operations than C does (in fact, it has fewer).
> 
> Hmm, maybe I'm thinking of Fortran 90 then.
> This doc seems to be saying that F90 has array ops
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html
> "Fortran 90 supports an array notation that allows operations on array 
> sections, and using vector indices."

I quit using FORTRAN before F90 <g>.

> And from that page, Fortran has an efficient built-in exponentiation 
> operator, which sounds to me like one more operation than C has.  But I 
> guess C has all the += type things, which I don't think Fortran has.  So 
> I guess you could argue that C has more than F77 at least.

I'd forgotten about the exponentiation operator.

> That's all true but at the same time Java on embedded systems is pretty 
> popular from what I understand, and Google is a big user of Python.

Google extensively uses C++. A lot of people use Python, and are forced 
to mix in C++ to speed up the slow parts. It would be much simpler for 
them if they could use the same language for both.