Origins of the D Programming Language

[anon reviewer]

On Friday, 30 November 2018 at 19:34:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Over the past few months, Walter, Mike, and myself have been 
> working on a draft submission for the HOPL 2020 conference 
> (History of Programming Languages).
>
> The submission proceeds in several stages. Currently we've been 
> through one round of preliminary review. Here is the current 
> draft:
>
> http://erdani.com/hopl2020-draft.pdf
>
> We'd appreciate feedback and additional historical details.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei (on behalf of Walter and Mike as well)

A final comment on historical details:

In the section on uniform function call syntax, the last sentence 
references recent proposals to add a uniform calling syntax to 
C++, but the wording suggests that this is currently a part of 
ISO C++, which it is not as the proposals have not been accepted 
yet.

Moreover, references to earlier proposals on this topic should be 
given. In particular Glassborow (2004), "N1585: Uniform Calling 
Syntax (Re-opening public interfaces)", was an early formal C++ 
proposal that identified the need for allowing free functions to 
be called with member function notation (albeit using a special 
annotation using "this" for such functions), and who first 
introduced (AFAIK) the term Uniform Calling Syntax (UCS) that 
this feature is now called. (see 
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2004/n1585.pdf 
)