Herb Sutter briefly discusses D during interview

[Jonathan M Davis]

On 2011-06-07 17:32, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> There's a question related to D and Go within the first eight minutes:
> 
> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Herb-Sutter-C-Questions-and-Answe
> rs

I find it interesting that C++0x's noexcept is still a runtime feature like 
exception specifications rather than going the static route that D's nothrow 
does. It'll be easier to implement that way, I expect, given that C++ 
compilers are already implementing exception specifications, but having it be 
statically-checked definitely has advantages. At least it's an improvement 
over exception specifications regardless.

From what he said about D, it definitely sounds like D is trying to go where 
he expects a systems programming language which could challenge C++ needs to 
go, though the only thing he really said in specific about D was that he 
thinks that we missed out on not improving the declaration and expression 
syntax such that it's left-to-right instead of right-to-left. That would be a 
pretty mind-bending change though, even if it were ultimately better. It 
wouldn't surprise me if it never even occurred to Walter or anyone else 
working on early D1 to go that route. It certainly wouldn't have ever occurred 
to me - particularly for the expression syntax. Thinking about it, I guess 
that Haskell and Scheme that way, so I've programmed in languages which were 
like that before, but they're functional, so they're already a huge paradigm 
shift, whereas C/C++ to D really isn't that big a shift. So, having a C-based 
language which was left-to-right would definitely throw me off, at least 
initially.

- Jonathan M Davis