[OT] What should be in a programming language?

[Yigal Chripun]

On 25/10/2009 08:47, bearophile wrote:
> Yigal Chripun:
>> there should be no syntactic difference between an int and a user
>> defined type.
>> for example I should be able to do:
>> struct foo : int {}
>
> With "alias this" D2 is able to do something like that, but it uses a nonstandard syntax... So here things may be improved in D2.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

This is one aspect that D inherited from C which I really dislike. 
adding alias this to the mix is adding a sin to a crime (as the Hebrew 
saying goes).

Scala shows how this can be properly designed.

D has many (sometimes very powerful) hacks that could and should be 
replaced with a much better general solution.
for instance there's special handling of void return types so it would 
be easier to work with in generic code. instead of this compiler hack a 
much simpler solution is to have a unit type and ditch C style void. the 
bottom type should also exist mainly for completeness and for a few 
stdlib functions like abort() and exit()