Does functional programming work?

[#ponce]

> 
> That's all gone in modern Pascal dialects. Delphi is very similar to D; 
> it's practically a Pascal version of D. The OOP features are the same, 
> except for some small differences, which make Delphi a bit more flexible 
> (virtual and named constructors...).
> 
> The only thing that was really lacking in Delphi are templates. But for 
> compensation, it had powerful RTTI. Try writing a 
> reflection/serialization mechanism in D that's as powerful Delphi's. I 
> bet you won't succeed, not even with D2. (Need to fix some compiler bugs 
> or deficiencies in the area of __traits first.) Even if you succeed, the 
> end result will be probably harder to use. (If that sounds polemic, show 
> me a D library that implements full serialization on 
> Delphi/Java/whatever level, and I'll shut up.)

Other interesting features of Delphi were:
- incredibly fast compilation time allowed by the language, you can almost develop in release mode
- properties "done right", with zero overhead (but cumbersome to write)
- similar productivity and feeling that D can provide
- very good low-level bit manipulation: absolute prevent all union tricks, "value" type casts are reinterpret_cast (no way to turn a float into an int silently), inline-assembly like D
- "Borland fastcall", using the three registers EAX, ECX and EDX