Is D still alive?

[spir]

On 01/27/2011 02:11 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 26, 2011 16:41:10 spir wrote:
>> On 01/26/2011 11:33 PM, Trass3r wrote:
>>>> For me, D's killer features were string handling (slicing and
>>>> appending/concatenation) and *no header files*. (No more header files!!
>>>> Yay!!!). But auto is fantastic too though, I get sooo much use out of
>>>> that.
>>>
>>> Getting rid of the pointer crap (proper arrays, bounds checking, classes
>>> as reference types,...) is definitely among the top 10 on my list.
>>
>> Same here. But I would prefere slicing not to check upper bound, rather
>> just extend to the end. Or have a slicing variant do that.
>
> You mean that if you give an index which is too large, it just uses $ instead?
> That sounds seriously bug-prone to me. I'd much rather that it blew up and thus
> told me that my program had a bug in it rather than silently trying to work.

Sorry, but you are wrong on this. I understand this sounds unsafe, but no. Most 
languages, I guess, just do that without any worry. In particular, I have 
frequented python and Lua mailing lists for years without even reading once 
about this beeing a misfeature (and indeed have never run into a bug because of 
this myself). It is simply the right semantics in 99.999% cases.

spir at d:~$ python
Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Sep 15 2010, 15:52:39)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = 'abc'
>>> s[0:123456789]
'abc'

spir at d:~$ lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> require"io"
> s = "abc"
> print(string.sub(s, 1, 123456789))
abc

I'm constantly annoyed by D's behaviour. For instance, often have to write out 
the end of a string from a given point, but only at most n chars (to avoid 
cluttering the output, indeed):
	writeln(s[i..i+n]);
which fails if there are less than n remaining chars ;-)

Denis
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