D is awesome, my situation, questions

[Dave]

mike.benfield at gmail.com wrote:
> 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?
> 

http://digitalmars.com/d/function.html

Look about 3/4 of the way down the page.

> Any chance of D getting an incremental garbage collector? 
> 

There's been some talk of at least a compacting collector of some sort 
that would probably be quite a bit faster for most things.