iterators again

[David B. Held]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> David B. Held wrote:
>> If you can find a D-size language designed by a community to show that 
>> that is a Better Way, I'm sure we would all be both surprised and 
>> delighted to hear about it.
> 
> One could argue that Ada is such a language, and it's really pretty nice 
> in my opinion.  But I wouldn't go so far as to call it a successful 
> language.  People have heard of it and it's used in the circles for whom 
> it was designed, but that's about it.

I actually used it in college because that's what my school taught for 
CS 1 and 2, and the most striking thing about Ada is that it was so far 
ahead of its time, it took about a decade for someone to implement a 
full compiler for the language.  Either that, or it was so overdesigned 
that nobody could implement it.  The problem was, it was only 
overdesigned at the time it was conceived.  By the time people got 
around to implementing it, other languages had already made it passe. 
It moved like molasses, and that's why the only major adopter has been 
an organization that moves like molasses: the DoD.

That being said, it has influenced subsequent languages, but has done so 
without being any of those languages, which is a dubious honor at 
best...one that I hope D can avoid by being smaller and nibler.  Of 
course, the counter-examples are all the major and popular languages 
that exist today that were primarily designed by one driving personality 
plus a small group of colleagues.

Dave