The D Scripting Language

[spir]

On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:15:50 +0100
Per Ångström <d-news at autark.se> wrote:

> On 2010-11-07 22:29, Tomek Sowiński wrote:
> > This wraps up a thread from a few days ago. Pascal featured my D
> > examples on his Scriptometer site.
> >
> > http://rigaux.org/language-study/scripting-language/
> >
> > D comes 17th out of 28, so it's so-so for scripting.
> >
> I'm wondering whether the issue of D's or-expression, compared to that 
> of languages such as Perl and Ruby, has been discussed and dismissed.
> 
> Personally, I was a bit disappointed to learn that D had such a 
> traditional or-expression, seeing how much it is willing to improve over 
> C/C++ in other areas.
> 
> I think the following code summarizes the issue. I'm not a language 
> lawyer, so maybe the rules could be described more succinctly, but I 
> think you'll get my drift. I'm aware that with D being a typed and 
> compiled language, there has to a be a restriction that both 
> sub-expressions must be convertible to a common type, but I'm sure that 
> can be worked out somehow.
> 
> string func(string s)
> {
>      /++
>      // A handy feature of many scripting languages, but not in D
>      // (in D, the type of the or-expression is bool):
>      // The type of the or-expression is the type of the first
>      // sub-expression that evaluates to true.
>      return s || "default";
>      +/
>      // The D equivalent, arguably more readable but also more verbose:
>      return s ? s : "default";
> }

More verbose?
	Real programmers *want* to type 3 more characters when this makes code clearer!
;-)

I read once that professional programmers produce about one dozen lines of effective code per day. Let us say they actually write three times more, by editing and/or recoding. How much time & effort is typing 36 lines of code? Maybe it's just me: I find nearly all complains about verbosity simply ridiculous. Programmers spend 49% of their time thinking about the model, 49% controlling their code, the rest typing.
I *want* my language of choice to let me write clear code -- this is by far the most important task of a language designer, and cost in terms of number of characters is hardly even a side-issue. All major problems around software come from the extreme difficulty of understanding.

Also: that logical expressions do not return logical values (read: bools) is arguably semantic mismatch (that necessarily hurts newcomers). I even find Lua's
	if x then doSomethingWith(x)
borderline (here "x" is shortcut for "x != nil").


Denis
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vit esse estrany ☣

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