Does D have too many features?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 29-04-2012 03:06, bearophile wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis:
>
>> * foreach_reverse is essentially redudant at this point (not to mention
>> confusing if combined with delegates), since we have retro.
>
> retro() can't replace foreach_reverse until the front-end
> demonstrability produces asm code equally efficient.
> Loops _must_ be fully efficient, they are a basic language construct,
> this is very important. Even foreach() is sometimes not equally
> efficient as a for() in some cases...
>
>
>> * I hate C style struct initializers and would really like to see them
>> go, but
>> for reasons that I don't understand, people actually use them rather
>> than using a proper constructor call,
>
> For single structs I prefer D-style initialization.
> But take a look at this code, if you replace those C-style initializers
> with D-style, even using aliases to shorten the code to single letters,
> that data section becomes more noisy:
> http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ray-casting_algorithm#D
>
>
>> * As for features that add little value, the first one that comes to
>> mind is
>> with. I think that I've used it all of once, and I don't think that
>> I've seen
>> it in other people's code very often.
>
> It's rather common in Pascal/Delphi programming. I use it now and then.
>
> For a case where it's very handy see here, with an enumeration:
> http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem#Alternative_version
>
>
>> It's hard to grep for (since with is
>> used in comments quite often),
>
> Try to search for "with(" or "with\s(", that are less common in normal
> text.
>
>
>> * Increasingly, I don't like UFCS. I think that in most cases, it
>> complicates
>> code for little value. And I _really_ don't like how it results in people
>> flipping chains of a(b(c(d(5)))) calls into something like
>> d(5).c().b.().a(). I
>> think that it makes the code way harder to read.
>
> For me it makes that kind of code way simpler to read...

Completely agree.

>
>
>> The code is completely backwards.
>
> It means call d on 5, then call c on the result, then call b on the
> result, and then call a on the result. It's better than before :-)

Amen.

>
> Bye,
> bearophile

-- 
- Alex