TDPL notes, part 1

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 07/14/2010 07:28 AM, bearophile wrote:
> I have finally received my copy of The D Programming Language :-)
> This is a first post of notes that I am writing while I read this
> text for the first time.

Thanks. Though the effort is definitely to be appreciated, there is a 
high risk that such long streams of consciousness come and go and are 
forgotten. There are more persistent places for proposing changes to the 
language or the book:

- for bug reports and enhancement proposals for D, use our Bugzilla 
repository (http://d.puremagic.com/issues)

- for book errata use http://erdani.com/tdpl/errata

> I'd like to know how many copies have being sold so far, it can give
> a starting idea of how many people are interested in D2.

I receive a statement from the publisher every 6 months. My 
understanding is that there are significant seasonal variations (summer 
being generally a slow time) and that the #1 influencing factor of sales 
are good reviews.

> I have seen the PDF on the site, but I'd like to see colored code in
> the electronic text. Source code colorization improves code
> readability (an offline PDF version that allows copy&paste can allow
> me to give better quotations here).

Unfortunately my choice in the matter is pretty limited. For the 
publisher a different version than the one printed is a red flag - in 
theory there could be differences in content too. I'll see what I can do.

> P 8, first program: - Unsigned integers are dangerous in D, their
> usage must be discouraged as much as possible, use them only when
> they are strictly necessary, they are premature optimization, don't
> use them in the first few hundred pages of the book. And assigning
> length to an uint loses precision anyway, because length is a size_t
> that can be 64 bits too, so in this early example it is *much* better
> to use just one int value.

That's indeed a bug, I primed the errata on your behalf.


Andrei