A summary of D's design principles

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Sat Sep 18 11:43:36 PDT 2010


retard wrote:
> Yes, Pascal WAS a teaching language. However, probably there are no 
> colleges using it these days. Teachers have adopted more recent languages 
> during the last 20 years and it makes no sense to compare anything to 
> Pascal anymore.

I meant it as an example of a language that was designed for a purpose other 
than what D was designed for. Sheesh!


> TP and Delphi both brought Pascal back to mainstream.

Delphi came along long after TP, and while it is a derivative of Pascal, it is 
not Pascal.


> I guess it's terribly hard to get rid of the 'ivory tower' stigma.

I didn't give it a stigma. I said it was designed as a research language - and 
it was. Their own designers said it was.


> What do you think is missing?

I did not say anything was missing, nor did I criticize Haskell. I made a 
statement of fact.


> Netscape Navigator is dead. Vbscript is dead. Nowadays the Web 2.0 world 
> is using IE 8, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 6, and many other standard compliant 
> browsers. The platforms of choice today are Flash 10, Silverlight, Java 
> 6, and Javascript. Everything else is obsolete.

True, but irrelevant. I mentioned these as examples whose goal was to push a 
related product. Want some more? PALASM, given away for free in order to get 
people to use Programmable Logic Arrays, and it was highly successful at doing that.


>> Basic is famous in that its charter specifically was for
>> non-programmers. Cobol was designed for managers to be able to
>> understand the code, not to write it (a slightly different aim).
> 
> Both Basic and Cobol are dead outside some legacy projects.

True, but irrelevant to my point. I see that nobody understood my point at all.


> The inventors of C just didn't realize it's a single paradigm language.

Meaning it was not deliberately designed as a single paradigm language. The 
topic I'm addressing is design goals for a language - not what the language 
became, evolved into, or whether it is in wide use or dead.


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