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So while D 2.0 is trying to solidify, I'm curious as to whether any thought has been given to removing features which are infrequently used, or adding features to help enable adoption for business programming. In the area of documentation, I'm not thoroughly convinced the <I>compile html</I> feature is very useful.<BR>
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I understand the concept of being able to prove expressions included in papers, and so on, as correct by compiling and executing them directly. I can't help but notice, however; that very few articles and papers actually include complete and coherent programs as the culmination of their examples. A lot of the time, papers include many small fragments of code. And all too often, these small fragments do not collate to provide a single functioning program. I should mention I don't find this as a short coming of the authors work, in any way. Many times, including a "main" is relatively useless...likewise, including the import statements to show where "writefln" comes from, for instance, is just line noise and doesn't equate to much for the reader of the document.<BR>
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This being the case, I can't imagine that many people have found the ability to compile HTML extracting the D source code from it is very useful. So can we just forget that happened and remove it from D 2.0? :-)<BR>
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Further, I think a more elaborate documentation mechanism is thoroughly appropriate. I do like D's attempt to provide a documentation syntax that does not make too many assumptions about the output format, doing things like not including HTML markup as a part of the standard. This is fine and dandy, but some intermediate formatting would be a useful feature, and D's incredibly light weight documentation comments do not enable this. Similarly cross-referencing is critical for documentation as far as I'm concerned, but D's documentation syntax doesn't allow this as well. Since you can link to a normal URL from just about anywhere, I don't think URLs should be omitted (I cross reference PDFs via HTTP quite regularly). When I write documentation in Java, it's chock-full of {@link} statements which refer the reader to the location of the information I do not wish to repeat. Some formatting and cross referencing features to enable richer documentation would be very useful features, in my opinion, and I'd like to see them added.<BR>
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Not to steer everyone off of the <I>const</I> topic...because that needs to be resolved once and for all... But just to point out a few of the short comings of D where it could put itself in a position to feel a lot more professional, and thus improve its ability to be adopted. And I wish nothing but for D to be adoptable, so maybe I can find a day job working with it some day and steer myself clear of all of these goddamn java weenies in business software.<BR>
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Cheers,<BR>
Scott S. McCoy<BR>
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