Does D have too many features?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 4/30/12 5:15 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis:
>
>> Honestly, I don't think that you _can_ take much from this thread
>> other than
>
> I don't agree, I see some recurring patterns.
>
> People have spent energy and time to write lot of answers in this
> thread, some good answer bits too, so I expect such work to not let be
> fully wasted. Asking for opinions, receiving lot of them, and then
> ignoring them all is not a good way to run a community.

It's a bit inappropriate to bind Walter to such a social contract upon 
having asked an informal question. Besides, if we're talking about work 
of writing posts we should also consider the considerable work of 
reading certain posts, which are so patronizing as to make reading an 
exercise in eye rolling.

> And thank you for your answer, I always appreciate your answers, but you
> aren't Walter, that post was for him (and Andrei) to answer :-)

FWIW there is little agreement among answers. Eliminating today's 
semantics of comma inevitably underlies the hope that it can be 
retrofitted for something else, which I think is near impossible without 
changing semantics of working code. Then there's a lot of busywork. 
Eliminating e.g. "with" is going to leave things pretty much where they 
are with the note some innocently bystanding programs are going to break.

One feature to remove stands out - the struct initialization:

struct S { int x, y; }
S s = { 1, 2 };

This, was noted, makes the order of members effectively part of the 
struct's interface, which is subtly dangerous. I think we should remove 
this feature.


Andrei