Final by default?

[Chris Williams]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Sorry, no. We are opposed to having compiler flags define 
> language semantics.

If done excessively, I could certainly see that. But outside of 
new languages that haven't gotten to that point yet, I don't know 
of any that don't have compiler/runtime flags of this sort. E.g. 
Java, Perl, C, C++, PHP, etc. I would be curious why you think D 
can escape this fate?

The only alternatives are:

1. Adding new syntax for things that are effectively the same 
(e.g. typedef vs phobos typedef) until the language definition is 
so long and full of so many variants that code by different 
people is mutually unintelligible, depending on when that person 
started learning the language, and the language starts to look 
like Perl with all the various symbols used to denote every other 
thing.

2. Deciding the language is perfect, regardless of whether it has 
ever reached a state that draws in clients.