Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

[Walter Bright]

On 8/11/2012 3:01 PM, F i L wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I'd rather have a 100 easy to find bugs than 1 unnoticed one that went out in
>> the field.
>
> That's just the thing, bugs are arguably easier to hunt down when things default
> to a consistent, usable value.

Many, many programming bugs trace back to assumptions that floating point 
numbers act like ints. There's just no way to avoid knowing and understanding 
the differences.


> When variables are defaulted to Zero, I have a
> guarantee that any propagated NaN bug is _not_ coming from them (directly). With
> NaN defaults, I only have a guarantee that the value _might_ be coming said
> variable.

I don't see why this is a bad thing. The fact is, with NaN you know there is a 
bug. With 0, you may never realize there is a problem. Andrei wrote me about the 
output of a program he is working on having billions of result values, and he 
noticed a few were NaNs, which he traced back to a bug. If the bug had set the 
float value to 0, there's no way he would have ever noticed the issue.

It's all about daubing bugs with day-glo orange paint so you know there's a 
problem. Painting them with camo is not the right solution.