Improve D's syntax to make it more python like

Brian Rogoff brogoff at gmail.com
Sat Mar 22 09:14:43 PDT 2014


On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 13:03:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> ALGOL60 did not have significant whitespace and an offside 
> rule, just
> like C, C++ and D don't, whereas Python, OCaml, etc. do.

I've programmed in OCaml for many years and I somehow missed the 
significant whitespace.  Even the Revised syntax for OCaml (the 
improved and unused one) did not use significant whitespace, 
though I recall that there were unloved projects to provide such 
a syntax.

C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the 
SPECS proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on. I liked some 
of the improvements suggested there, in particular the more 
Pascal-ish or Scala-ish declaration syntax, and would have liked 
something like that in D, but there are so many more issues to be 
fixed that daydreams of improved syntax seem frivolous to me.




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