Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

[Walter Bright]

On 8/11/2012 1:30 AM, Era Scarecrow wrote:
> On Saturday, 11 August 2012 at 04:33:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> It's too bad that ints don't have a NaN value, but interestingly enough,
>> valgrind does default initialize them to some internal NaN, making it a most
>> excellent bug detector.
>
>   The compiler could always have flags specifying if variables were used, and if
> they are false they are as good as NaN. Only downside is a performance hit
> unless you Mark it as a release binary. It really comes down to if it's worth
> implementing or considered a big change (unless it's a flag you have to
> specially turn on)

Not so easy. Suppose you pass a pointer to the variable to another function. 
Does that function set it?