Coolest D features

[janderson]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> Say you wanted to introduce a programmer friend to D. She might know one 
> of D's sibling languages (Java, C, C++, or C#), but you shouldn't rely 
> too much on that. What features of D would you describe first to hook 
> that friend in?
> 
> Andrei

Let me put it this way.  I was coding in C# the other day and I was so 
frustrated with the arrays.  They are not standardized.  There seems to 
be about 10 different ways to specifying arrays (note that I'm including 
net).

Some use count and others use length.  Some are fixed size and others 
arn't.  Some can be allocated at a particular size on the fly but then 
you can't change it without creating a brand new array.  It took my an 
hour to work out how to convert an ArrayList to an ViewItem[] list 
because it uses a completely un-logical mechanism.

Also most net classes still haven't adopted templates so your left with 
these horrible un-typesafe objects which you can only figure out at run 
time (if your lucky).  Granted D doesn't even have anything like net, 
but I doubt it will be anywhere near as bad with standardized arrays.

std in C++ is better but u still get the same problem as many libs what 
to implement there own type.

-Joel