facilitating automatic differentiation

[Dominic Jones]

I have worked on differentiating algorithms written in Fortran 90/95
using Tapenade (http://www-sop.inria.fr/tropics/tapenade.html) with
moderate success.

For more expressive languages the source transformation process
rapidly tends towards the impossible. However, I speculate that in D
some of its language features (e.g. mixin, scope) may facilitate
differentiation without recourse to an external tool.

I don't know D well enough, and I am not familiar with the possible
trickery that can be done with such a language, but if there is
someone who does have some understanding of automatic
differentiation and is competent with D, I'd be very interested in
your comments as to whether or not such a pursuit is worthwhile.

Thank you
Dominic Jones