Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:02:15 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> I plan to give a talk at Lang.NEXT  
> (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012) with the  
> subject above. There are a few features of D that turned out to be  
> successful, in spite of them being seemingly unimportant or diverging  
> from related consecrated approaches.
>
> What are your faves? I have a few in mind, but wouldn't want to  
> influence answers.

The two that I would cite are auto and slice syntax.  I see others have  
chimed in with the same two.

These were two features that did *not* attract me to D, but I found them  
to be two of my favorites, and ones I miss the most when writing in other  
languages.

If I had to pick a third, I'd say the omitting parentheses for 1-arg  
templates was something I didn't expect to be as great as it is.

Possibly one other thing I didn't expect to be so nice was shared (more  
specifically, the implications when something is *not* shared).  That  
enabled weak-pure functions which I think are going to be a HUGE feature  
for D.

-Steve