Just where has this language gone wrong?

[Stuart]

On Monday, 23 July 2012 at 15:56:37 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 23.07.2012 14:49, schrieb Stuart:
>> On Saturday, 21 July 2012 at 22:16:52 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> C++ is living in the 70's.
>>
>> Precisely what I have been thinking. It's a loose wrapper 
>> around
>> assembly, nothing more. Certainly not the "high-level language"
>> it's touted as.
>
> Only due to the lack of modules.
>
> Everything else is a pretty modern language I would say.

Hardly. No RTTI. No GC. No properties. No events. No closures. No 
extension methods. No interfaces. No writable references.

I can live without a GC; and interfaces can be simulated using 
pure virtual base classes; but all the others are standard in 
pretty much any modern language and impossible to reproduce in 
C++.

Incidentally, it'd be really handy to have anonymous tuples in D. 
Not many languages let you do that. For example:

    tuple!(int, float) fn() { ... }

    int a;
    float b;
    (a, b) = fn();

    auto (c, d) = fn();

Saves us having to create a struct for every goddamn little 
function; or using tuples directly, which means we have to refer 
to variables like .value1 and .value2 instead of something 
meaningful.