Few mixed things

[bearophile]

Few things I have collected in the last days.

Can RAND_MAX be added to std.c.stdlib of D1 too?

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What is the advantage of having a separate /+ +/ nestable comment syntax?
Can't the /+ +/ be removed to make the normal /* */ syntax nestable?
(IS the different C semantics of /* */ a problem here? I don't think so.)

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Using obj2asm to the .obj produced by D2 (v2.029) produced huge (like 100-600 KB!) asm files even for 10-lines long programs (The same asm files where very small for D1). There's a very large amount of asm code inside there.

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>From the Python newsgroup:

>Linden Lab, makers of Second LIfe virtual world, found it was good to create a C++ class similar to a Python dictionary in order to leverage some of the faster prototyping advantages of that Python type when converting to C++.<

>LLSD is a proposed IETF standard so there's no licensing issues involved in using the technique, and I believe there are implementations in C++ (GPL) and C#(BSD) and possible other languages as well.<

>Linden Lab Structured Data (LLSD) is an abstract type system intended to provide a language-neutral facility for the representation of structured data.  It provides a type system, a serialization system and an interface description language.<

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LLSD
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-hamrick-llsd-00.txt

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The std.intrinsic module may gain a standard way to perform a 64-bit by 32-bit division, for the situations where you know the quotient will fit in 32 bits ('divl' instruction on X86).
CPUs that don't support such operation can use the normal 64-big division.

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I don't like the way Ruby denotes intervals open/closed on the right.

The following is how you do it in the Groovy language (but I don't like it, because I like intervals by default open on the right):

Loop on closed on the right range:
for (i in 0..n)

Loop on open on the right range:
for (i in 0..<n)


Two possible syntaxes for D, to represent intervals closed on the right, using ..#  or  ..> 

for (i; 0 ..# n)
for (i; 0 ..> n)

I like the syntax with # better.
But probably adding a +1 at the end is good enough too for D. Better keep things simpler.

Later,
bearophile