Why Ruby?

[loser]

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> On 12/17/10 10:23 AM, Justin Johansson wrote:
> > On 17/12/10 06:52, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >> On 12/16/10 1:30 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> >>>
> >>> The point here isn't that we want "a" and "b" to be replaced with "_"
> >>> the point is that we want to get rid of the string and have a shorter
> >>> and less verbose syntax for delegate literals.
> >>
> >> I understand. Using strings is witnessing the fact that we couldn't find
> >> a shorter syntax that didn't have problems. That being said, it's very
> >> possible there are some great ones, we just couldn't find them.
> >>
> >> Andrei
> >
> > "we just couldn't find them"
> >
> > Is that the royal "we" as in singular?
> > If plural, may one politely inquire as to whom "we" are?
> 
> Walter, Bartosz Milewski, Eric Niebler, David Held and myself have 
> discussed the issue a number of times. It has also been often discussed 
> on this newsgroup.

I find few things odd. First, Eric and David are your C++ buddies. Why are you having this secret society instead of openly discussing D features in the D mailing lists? Invite them here, please. We are the community, we also have an opinion of this language. The C++ users' opinions are often very conservative and hostile towards ideas that don't resemble C++ syntax or aren't performance oriented. Evidently the D community in general wants a better lambda syntax, and the recently proposed feature is actually better than the currently used string hack, given a properly optimizing compiler.

This has been discussed several times and every time your secret society tells that nothing could be found. We never hear what's the real reason blocking this. Why can't you spend that two minutes writing down your conclusions. It feels like you're not doing your job. Only two things come to my mind: 1) the proposed feature goes too far from C++ syntactically or semantically, 2) Walter cannot implement it probably because of some conflicting legacy C syntax or it requires too much changes in the compiler (== is not a low-hanging fruit => doesn't motivate him), 3) D 2.0 is already set in stone and you don't want to admit that further improvements are still needed in the near future (this would make your template/string lambda idiom and the D 2.0 feature set an embarrasing short sighted hack). Admit it Andrei, it has some problems. The different string parameters generate bloat in object code and the lookup issues are also bad. With a properly optimizing compiler the real lambda can be optimized to generate equal object code without any of these problems.

Not finding the solution is quite surprising considering that almost all other modern languages are finding more or less the same solution and every time a community member here suggests a solution, it's more or less the same. What are the problem you're having?