What are the worst parts of D?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:40:28PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 9/25/2014 4:08 AM, Don wrote:
[...]
> >Ask yourself, if D had no users other than you, so that you break
> >*anything*, what would you remove? Make a wishlist, and then find out
> >what's possible.  Remember, when you did that before, we successfully
> >got rid of 'bit', and there was practically no complaint.
> 
> Top of my list would be the auto-decoding behavior of
> std.array.front() on character arrays. Every time I'm faced with that
> I want to throw a chair through the window.

LOL... now I'm genuinely curious what's Andrei's comment on this. :-P
Last I heard, Andrei was against removing autodecoding.


> Probably second would be having const and purity by default.

Some of this could be mitigated if we expanded the sphere of attribute
inference. I know people hated the idea of auto == infer attributes, but
I personally support it.

Perhaps an alternate route to that is to introduce a @auto (or whatever
you wanna call it, @infer, or whatever) and promote its use in D code,
then slowly phase out functions not marked with @infer. After a certain
point, @infer will become the default, and explicit @infer's will become
no-op, and then subsequently dropped. This is very ugly, though. I much
prefer extending auto to mean infer.


T

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