Why I'm Excited about D

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 7 April 2015 at 14:20:58 UTC, Jens Bauer wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 April 2015 at 08:33:58 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>> @property isn't really about parentheses-less calls 
>> (parentheses are optional for all function calls), it's more 
>> for this sort of thing:
>> [snip]
>>    @property void val(int v)
>>    {
>>        a_ = (a_ & flagMask) & (v & ~flagMask);
>>    }
>
> This is *really* cool and very useful on microcontrollers and 
> is superior to C's bit-fields.
>
> Imagine that your microcontroller has 24 GPIO pins.
> Such pins are usually grouped in 'ports', for instance Port A 
> and Port B.
> Each port could for instance support up to 32 pins: PA0 ... 
> PA31 and PB0 ... PB31.
> But there's a problem here: Our microcontroller has only 24 
> pins, and our microcontroller vendor chose to make the 
> following pins available to us:
> PA1 ... PA5, PA7, PA13, PA17, PA18 .. PA19, PA23 ... PA28
> PB0 ... PB3, PB8 ... PB12
>
> Every developer will think this is annoying. We want to write a 
> byte to a port, but it has to be converted first.
>
> If just incrementing a value, one could do as follows:
> PortB = (PortB | 0x00f0) + 1;
> ... oposite for decrementing:
> PortB = (PortB & 0xff0f) - 1;
>
> But the @property can make all this transparent, so our sources 
> become very easy to overview and understand.

and, for convenience there is 
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_bitmanip.html#.bitfields