A summary of D's design principles

[JMRyan]

One thing that seems to have been missed in this discussion:  minimize (or 
at least reduce from C++ levels) undefined behavior.  That's the reason for 
auto-initialized variables.  It's not to provide aconvenience for those 
times when the default values are what you want.  It's so that failure to 
initialize will cause your program to fail in consistent and predictable 
ways.  It is also the reason for providng clear() as an alternative to 
delete().  Dereferencing dangling pointers results in undefined behavior.  
Accessing a cleared object results in admittedly bad but at least defined 
behavior.