Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/20/13 10:47 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/20/2013 7:21 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>> On 20/08/13 00:00, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> While not unique to D, I believe that ranges will become a killer
>>> feature -
>>> killer enough that languages that don't support pipeline programming
>>> will start
>>> looking like propeller driven airliners.
>>
>> On that note -- I was chatting with a (very functional- and
>> Lisp-oriented)
>> friend about D and, when ranges were mentioned, he immediately
>> connected it with
>> Clojure's concept of "sequences": http://clojure.org/sequences
>>
>> Does anyone know the history/relationship here between these and D's
>> ranges? Was
>> it a direct influence from D, or convergent evolution -- and can
>> anyone comment
>> on the relative merits of the D vs. Clojure approaches?
>
> This style of programming has been around at least since the Unix "pipes
> and filters" model. It also appears as C#'s LINQ programming style.
>
> However, LINQ and Clojure were not direct influences on D's ranges.

It's a common omission to equate D's ranges with pipes/filters. That 
misses the range categorization, which is inspired from C++ iterators.

A relatively accurate characterization of D ranges is a unification of 
C++ iterators with pipes/filters.


Andrei