Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Kapps" <opantm2+spam at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:nnqtlpjqwdnzuwiqcycr at forum.dlang.org...
> On Wednesday, 21 March 2012 at 17:20:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/21/2012 7:23 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>> But, is import unlikely success, or is this just a
>>> leftover feeling from my massive bias in the early
>>> days? I have to say it is my bias, since everyone
>>> else uses import and they all know it is good.
>>
>> I knew import would be good :-)
>>
>> It's because I've used languages before with an import, and as a compiler 
>> guy, I knew what a kludge #include is. The preprocessor in C/C++ is a 
>> crutch to make up for deficiencies in the language.
>
> On the topic of import, mixin imports are something that I believe will 
> eventually become a great deal more popular than they are today. First, 
> there's the advantage of being able to use a language/syntax more 
> appropriate for the task at hand. For example, for things that output html 
> you could just import mixin a raw html file. But the real advantage is 
> that you can still do compile-time processing on this. Plug in an xml 
> parser, or something like pegged, and you can now extend Html and generate 
> D code for it. For example, if you have something like runat="server" on 
> an element, just like in ASP.net you could create a serverside element for 
> this and manipulate it. Because you know exactly which parts are static 
> and which are dynamic, you could (at compile time) create buffers 
> containing the static portions to prevent having to copy things many 
> times. Unlike other languages, there would be no performance hit to doing 
> this because it's all done at compile time. This is just one example. 
> Another one would be automatically creating bindings for a scripting 
> language, or even automatically creating bindings for a C header file.

Oh yea, definitely. I'm already using HTML mixin imports for the little bit 
of sever-side web stuff I've started playing around with in D.