Does D have too many features?

[Don Clugston]

On 28/04/12 20:47, 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?

Other ones which were agreed to a long time ago were:

* NCEG operators

* built-in .sort and .reverse

=============================

About the NCEG operators -- the reason they're redundant is that you 
practically always want to treat NaN separately.

I've tried _very_ hard to come up with uses for them, but without success.

The thing I've used the most is:
x !<>= x

which is a kind of built-in isNaN(x), but that can also be rewritten as:
x != x

Initially I though you'd do things like

real func(real x)
{
// x must be non-NaN and in the range -x.infinity .. N
   if (x !< N)
       return real.nan;

but even that isn't convincing, because if x is NaN you should be 
returning x, so that you preserve NaN payloads.

I think I have used these guys more than anyone else, but I still 
haven't found a single use case that stands up to scrutiny.