D - more or less power than C++?

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Walter Bright wrote:
> I started a new thread for this:
> 
> "Mike Capp" <mike.capp at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:dua67i$12cr$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>> 7. D has all (well, most of) the power of C++
> 
> I see this often and am a bit perplexed by it. What power do you feel is 
> missing?

Nothing significant.

> 
> And what about the missing power in C++ - inline assembler, nested 
> functions, contract programming, unit testing, automatic documentation 
> generation, static if, delegates, dynamic closures, inner classes, modules, 
> garbage collection, scope guard?
> 
> What does D have to do to have more power than C++? 

I think besides bugs and template/array-issues D is almost ready. One
major thing that's bugging me though is the role of interfaces in D.
I've always thought that D should use interfaces like Java does. Still D
(according to the BNF-syntax in the docs) introduces protection
attributes to class inheritance. OTOH a trivial test case shows that
(luckily) they are not implemented (at least not the way C++ uses them).
IMHO they're not welcome at all, if we are going to support accessing
classes via interface references:

 interface foo { (public) void abc() { ... } }
 class bar : private foo // something very wrong here
 {}

 void main() {
  foo obj = new bar();
  obj.abc();
 }


The private-protection forces C++ to do a runtime check on the 7. row
and prevent the use. This is complete insanity. Also .sort:ing and other
important operations don't really work currently with the arrays of
interface references to different derived classes of foo. As a
workaround abstract classes must be used as interfaces, but this
prevents the emulation of multiple inheritance. As far as I understand
these interface references aren't as efficient as class references but
they're still damn useful for many practical (non-time critical) purposes.

-- 
Jari-Matti