Does D have too many features?

[Timon Gehr]

On 04/28/2012 11:04 PM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 29.04.2012 0:57, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 04/28/2012 09:22 PM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>>> On 28.04.2012 22:47, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this question. The
>>>> idea was which features in D are redundant and/or do not add
>>>> significant
>>>> value?
>>>>
>>>> A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat, cdouble
>>>> and creal types.
>>>>
>>>> What's your list?
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. Drop is(...) feature entirely. Extend __traits where needed and move
>>> compile-time reflection to "magic" meta namespace completely.
>>>
>>> 2. "enum as manifest constant". Use static or immutable/global.
>>
>> static is not accessible at compile time, would you want to change that?
>> immutable is not an option because it infects the type.
>>
> Oops, scratch that comment about static/immutable.
>
> But how about:
> alias thing = runSomeCtfe();
>

That would work in certain cases, where the initializer is not a single 
symbol. But then, I kinda like the way 'enum' is generalized in D:

enum Foo{
     member1,
     member2,
     member3,
}

=> (allow non-integral enumerations)

enum Foo{
     member1 = "1",
     member2 = "2",
     member3 = "3",
}

=> (anonymous enums)

enum{
     member1 = "1",
     member2 = "2",
     member3 = "3",
}

=> (a single member is okay)

enum{
     member1 = "1",
}

=> (syntactic sugar)

enum member1 = "1";

> And bring the usual alias to new_name = <something>;
> form (even C++ finally got this right with C++11 aliases).
>

This is probably something that should be done.

>> I actually think D is not too large.
>
> For what it does - surely not. But in general it's big.
> For one it's not smaller then C++.

I am not sure how to compare, but D 'feels' smaller than C++ to me.

Implementing a compiler is probably harder for D, because of the 
interplay of forward references, CTFE and compile time introspection.