How does D improve design practices over C++?

[Tony]

Let me be facetious with Janderson's list plz...

"Janderson" <ask at me.com> wrote in message 
news:ge8tpd$1f6b$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Hi,
>
> I was talking with some collages at work and they asked me how D enforces 
> good programming practices.   For course I mentioned a couple of the ones 
> I knew of hand -
>
> - Unit checking

Not sure what is meant by this, but it sounds minor.

> - Design by contract

Overblown concept, but can be done with C++ also to a more than adequate 
degree (heard of assertions?).

> - Invariant checks

Part of DbC concepts. See Koenig and Moo's array example in "Accelerated 
C++". Which, btw, leads me to believe that there are few instances "where 
the stars line up just right" for invariant checking to be useful.

> - Stronger const

Insignificant. I still use many #defines just because I know that const vars 
take space and #defines are a pre-compile-time thing (yes, I value the 
preprocessor for some uses, this being one of them).

> - Modules

If that means doing away with header files, I don't think I like it. I rely 
on headers as the engineer's blueprint (of course you have to write very 
clean code to have that make sense).

> - Garbage collection

That's a major deal breaker for me.

> - No automatic copy constructor

Can't comment.

> - More restrictive operators

I'm not really concerned about that. I'd avoid them unless doing numerical 
programming.

> - Delegates (Specifically, encouraging there use by making them simple to 
> use)

Can't comment.

> - Specific constructs such as Interfaces

C++ has interfaces. Should it be a keyword? Maybe. How are D's interfaces 
different from C++'s?

> - More restrictive casting

Ouch!! I prefer to slice bread with a knife rather than having a machine do 
it. (Bad analogy, but y'all get the point).

> - No C style Macros

Implementing a template or template system with a good preprocessor is 
something completely different than macros. I value the preprocessor for 
such uses (I wish it was more powerful than in C++ though).

Tony