D is awesome, my situation, questions

[mike.benfield at gmail.com]

I just read the D reference manual and downloaded the GCD D implementation and
I've been playing 
with it for a couple hours. D is great. Very very cool. 

(If anyone doesn't want to read my little anecdote, skip down a little.)

I learned about D's existence about a year or a year and a half ago. I pretty
much dismissed it - more 
C++-like stuff was not what I was after. I'm mostly into functional programming
- ML, Scheme, etc 
(although don't get me wrong, I've certainly done plenty of coding in C and
C++). Fast forward a bit, 
and I was getting frustrated with those languages (well, not so much the
languages themselves, but 
rather the supporting environment for writing portable application code in those
languages) for various 
reasons - most notably the pain it was to interact with C. I kept thinking "If
only there was a language 
like C++, but as a clean design instead of as kludge upon kludge - and with
GARBAGE COLLECTION." 
And I was thinking "And if only it had built in support for Design by Contract
and unit testing." I kid you 
not. And then I vaguely remembered D, and went to check it out.

Anyway, I've played with D for a couple hours, and it's awesome, but inevitably
there are features I miss 
from the FP world (ahem, variant types, pattern matching, real closures...). I
wrote some tuple templates 
- any chance tuples could go in the standard library? (hey, even C++ is getting
tuples now).

Can someone explain to me the difference between delegates and functions?

Any chance of D getting an incremental garbage collector? 

Are there any contingency plans for D if Walter gets abducted by Martians or
decides to abandon 
language design and compiler implementation and take up knitting instead? I'm a
little scared of the 
prospect of using tools that depend almost entirely on a single wizard.