What Makes A Programming Language Good

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:05:34 +0200, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:20:56 +0200, Walter Bright  
>> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2011/01/18/what-makes-a-programming-language-good/
>>  So, why do users still get a scary linker error when they try to  
>> compile a program with more than 1 module?
>
> What is that message?

C:\Temp\D\Build> dmd test1.d
OPTLINK (R) for Win32  Release 8.00.8
Copyright (C) Digital Mars 1989-2010  All rights reserved.
http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html
test1.obj(test1)
  Error 42: Symbol Undefined _D5test21fFZv
--- errorlevel 1

1) The error message is very technical:
   a) does not indicate what exactly is wrong (module not passed to linker,  
not that the linker knows that)
   b) does not give any indication of what the user has to do to fix it
2) OPTLINK doesn't demangle D mangled names, when it could, and it would  
improve the readability of its error messages considerably.
    (I know not all mangled names are demangleable, but it'd be a great  
improvement regardless)

> dmd can build entire programs with one command:
>
>     dmd file1.d file2.d file3.d ...etc...

That doesn't scale anywhere. What if you want to use a 3rd-party library  
with a few dozen modules?

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net