Does D have too many features?
foobar
foo at bar.com
Sat Apr 28 12:58:02 PDT 2012
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this
> question. The idea was which features in D are redundant and/or
> do not add significant value?
>
> A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat,
> cdouble and creal types.
>
> What's your list?
D has a lot of ad-hock features which make the language
needlessly large and complex. I'd strive to replace these with
better general purpose mechanisms.
My list:
* I'd start with getting rid of foreach completely. (not just
foreach_reverse). This is nothing more than a fancy function with
a delegate parameter.
* enum - enum should be completely redesigned to only implement
what it's named after: enumerations.
* version - this does not belong in a programming language. Git
is a much better solution.
* di files - a library should encapsulate all the info required
to use it. Java Jars, .Net assemblies and even old school; Pascal
units all solved this long ago.
* This is a big one: get rid of *all* current compile time
special syntax. It should be replaced by a standard compilation
API and the compiler should be able to use plugins/addons. This
would reduce the size of the language to half of its current
size, maybe even more.
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