Newbie to D initial suggestion

[Walter Bright]

Edward Diener wrote:
> I have a basic initial suggestion, as I am persuing the D pdf dcument I 
> downloaded in order to understand of what the language consisted. The 
> basic suggestion regards documentation for D itself. I believe the most 
> important thing for getting others to be interested in a new programming 
> language is the unglamorous chore of presenting the documentation for 
> that language to others. While the pdf documentation I am reading is 
> adequately thorough, I have a few suggestions:

I agree with you, but the current problem is that the pdf files need to 
be manually created, and they fall further and further out of date. What 
needs to be done is to be able to automatically generate a pdf from the 
web site source material.

> 1) A link to the downloaded documentation for D should be almost the 
> first thing a viewer should see when they click on the D portion of the 
> Digital Mars web site. It should be front and center. I realize there is 
> a separate Language link on the left hand side which takes me to an 
> online set of pages which explain D and I realize that somewhere down on 
> the initial page there is a line which reads "This document is available 
> as a pdf" with a link on that final word, but I think this is still too 
> indirect. The normal reaction to any new language is to download the 
> documentation detailing that language so that it can be read and/or 
> printed at the end-user's leisure.

I agree, the front page needs to be revamped.

> 2) Since D is highly related to C++ there should be a document for C++ 
> programmers detailing the differences between D and C++, which again is 
> downloadable almost immediately from the main web page of D. I did not 
> find any such document although there is occasional mention of these 
> diferences in the pdf document I downloaded.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/cpptod.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/ctod.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/pretod.html

> 3) There is evidently a version 2.0 and above of D. Perhaps it is not 
> meant for anybody to become interested in this version who is just 
> attempting to learn what D is about, but the complete lack of any 
> documentation which I could find about this version and/or its 
> difference from the 1.0 version is not a good thing.

I agree, but for now, http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html 
has the information.


> Now I will continue to read on about D at my leisure, and see if I am 
> interested in pursuing my initial interest in it. If I have any general 
> suggestions about the language I hope they will be taken in the spirit 
> of things intended to improve things rather than as an antagonism to the 
> ideas presented there.

No problem. It's good feedback.