disabling unary "-" for unsigned types

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

bearophile wrote:
> - And finally in D2 there are several new features that are sometimes
> only half-implemented, and generally no one has tried them in long
> programs, they seem to come from just the mind of few (intelligent)
> people, they don't seem battle-tested at all. Such new features are a
> dangerous bet, they can hide many traps and problems. Finalizing the
> D2 language before people have actually tried to use such features in
> some larger programs looks dangerous. Recently I have understood that
> this is why Simon Peyton-Jones said "Avoid success at all costs"
> regarding Haskell, that he has slowly developed for about 15 years:
> to give the language the time to be tuned, to remove warts, to
> improve it before people start to use it for rear and it needs to be
> frozen (today we are probably in a phase when Haskell has to be
> frozen, because there is enough software written in it that you can't
> lightly break backward compatibility).

The response of the Haskell community seems to be "avoid avoiding 
success". Anyway, either slogan shouldn't be taken out of context, and I 
don't think the situations of the two languages are easily comparable. 
For example, a few years ago monads weren't around. At that point, a 
different I/O method was considered "it" for functional programs (I 
swear I know which, but I forgot). Behind closed doors every functional 
language designer was scratching their head trying to find a better way. 
It's good Haskell didn't commit to the now obsolete I/O method - as good 
as D not committing to yesteryear's threading model.

> So I am a little worried for some of the last features introduced in
> D2. I don't know if D3 can solve this problem (maybe not).

I read the entire post waiting for the punchline. Which features do you 
have in mind?


Andrei