removal of cruft from D

[Justin Johansson]

Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:he6sqe$1dqu$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Based on recent discussions on the NG a few features were 
>>> deprecated/removed from D, such as typedef and C style struct 
>>> initializers.
>>>
>>> IMO this cleanup and polish is important and all successful languages 
>>> do such cleanup for major releases (Python and Ruby come to mind). 
>>> I'm glad to see that D follows in those footsteps instead of 
>>> accumulating craft like C++ does.
>>>
>>>
>>> As part of this trend of cleaning up D before the release of D2, what 
>>> other features/craft should be removed/deprecated?
>>>
>>> I suggest reverse_foreach and c style function pointers
>>>
>>> please add your candidates for removal.
>>>
>>
>> s/reverse_foreach/foreach_reverse/ ;)
>>
>> 1. Floating point literals without digits on *both* sides!!! "1.", 
>> ".1" --> Useless hindrance to future language expansion!
>>
>> 2. Octal literals! I think it'd be great to have a new octal syntax, 
>> or even better, a general any-positive-inter-base syntax. But until 
>> that finally happens, I don't want "010 == 8" preserved. And I don't 
>> think the ability to have an octal literal is important enough that 
>> lacking it for a while is a problem. And if porting-from-C really has 
>> to be an issue, then just make 0[0-9_]+ an error for a transitionary 
>> period (or forever - it'd at least be better than maintaining "010 == 
>> 8").
> 
> It would definitely be a problem if octal literals disappeared from the 
> language, even if only for a short while. They are pretty much the only 
> sensible way to specify POSIX file permissions.
> 
>   import core.sys.posix.sys.stat;
>   ...
>   chmod("path/to/file", 0755);
> 
> -Lars

Good point.  Few if any other of us though of that! :-)