too much sugar not good for the health

[Dan]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) Wrote:

> David B. Held wrote:
> > Alexander Panek wrote:
> >> [...]
> >> You have a point, though the beauty & readability of D pretty much 
> >> nullifies that. The syntax sugar that is added so far does not 
> >> actually complicate the parsing so much, so D's syntax can still be 
> >> seen as clean, IMHO.
> > 
> > I think the ridiculous size of the front-end is a pretty good existence 
> > proof.  Take a look, Neal.
> 
> Take a look at Polyglot. Even Java syntax is heinous to parse.

Oh my!

We all know that D's front end is bad, Java's is heinous, and C++ is starting to become a moral issue (it's just WRONG! you may cry)

That said, I agree with the above.  Arrays should not have a native, non-library sort or reverse "property" that's really a method.  We should and can also bind methods to AA's, or build our own structures that act like AA's and attach methods to them.

Essentially all you need to do is populate the associative array with function*'s.  You may have to dereference them...