too much sugar not good for the health

[David B. Held]

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.

Actually, D's front-end was a lot smaller than I was expecting.  Only 
1.5 MB of C++ code, whereas g++ is almost 4 MB tarred & zipped. 
Granted, that includes a backend, but if I recall correctly, gcc's 
source is around 20 MB uncompressed (though with how many front-ends, 
I'm not sure).

Dave