Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

[F i L]

Mehrdad wrote:
> Note to Walter:
>
> You're obviously correct that you can make an arbitrarily 
> complex program to make it too difficult for the compiler to 
> enforce initialization, the way C# does (and gives up in some 
> cases).
> 
> [ ... ]

I think some here are mis-interpreting Walters position 
concerning static analysis from our earlier conversation, so I'll 
share my impression of his thoughts.

I can't speak for Walter, of course, but I'm pretty sure that 
early on in our conversation he agreed that having the compiler 
catch local scope initialization issues was a good idea, or at 
least, wasn't a bad one (again, correct me if I'm wrong). I doubt 
he would be adverse to eventually having DMD perform this sort of 
static analysis to help developers, though I doubt it's a high 
priority for him.

The majority of the conversation after that was concerning 
struct/class fields defaults:

   class Foo
   {
       float x; // I think this should be 0.0f
                // Walter thinks it should be NaN
   }

In this situation static analysis can't help catch issues, and 
we're forced to rely on a default value of some kind. Both Walter 
and I have stated our opinion's reasoning previously, so I won't 
repeat them here.