Does D have too many features?

[Timon Gehr]

On 04/28/2012 09:58 PM, foobar wrote:
> 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).


foreach is very useful. Have you actually used D?

> This is nothing more than a fancy function with
> a delegate parameter.
>

That would be opApply.

> * enum - enum should be completely redesigned to only implement
> what it's named after: enumerations.
>

What is the benefit?

> * version - this does not belong in a programming language. Git
> is a much better solution.
>

So you'd maintain a git branch for every OS if there is some small part 
that is OS-dependent? I don't think that is a better approach at all.

> * 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.

What would that be exactly?

> It should be replaced by a standard compilation
> API and the compiler should be able to use plugins/addons.

Are you serious?

> This would reduce the size of the language to half of its current
> size, maybe even more.

I am certain that it would not.


You missed to present the 'general purpose mechanisms'.