How does D improve design practices over C++?

[Robert Fraser]

Christopher Wright wrote:
> This is mostly the fault of the unittest runners in Tango and Phobos, 
> I'd wager, but you still won't be able to name unittests without 
> changing the compiler, and that's a major issue, in my opinion.

A while ago I did some work regarding this (the beginnings of it can be 
seen in the Descent trunk). In a nutshell, it is possible to get D's 
unit tests working just like any unit testing system (i.e. run specific 
tests, run them all & track failures, etc., etc.), but it would be a 
huge project.

In that framework, all tests were assigned an automatic name based on 
their scope/namespace. So if you had module foo.bar with class Baz, the 
unit tests in that class would be named foo.bar.Baz.0, foo.bar.Baz.1, 
etc., based on their lexical ordering. I also added the ability to name 
a test by adding mixin(TestName!"whatever"), but your tests would work 
with the framework without any modification if you so chose.

However, all this depended on Flectioned. As Flectioned got out of date, 
it became lass attractive to work on the framework, since I would 
basically need to re-write/maintain Flectioned along with the test runner.