Why is `scope` planned for deprecation?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 16 November 2014 at 19:24:47 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> This made C far, far more difficult and buggy to work with than 
> it should have been.

Depends on your view of C, if you view C as step above assembly 
then it makes sense to treat everything as pointers. It is a bit 
confusing in the beginning since it is more or less unique to C.

> 2. 0 terminated strings
>
> This makes it surprisingly difficult to do performant string 
> manipulation, and also results in a excessive memory 
> consumption.

Whether using sentinels is slow or fast depends on what you want 
to do, but it arguably save space for small strings (add a length 
+ alignment and you loose ~6 bytes).

Also dealing with a length means you cannot keep everything in 
registers on simple CPUs.

A lexer that takes zero terminated input is a lot easier to write 
and make fast than one that use length.

Nothing prevents you from creating a slice as a struct though.

> sensibilities to it. But if we were to, a vast amount of C 
> could be dramatically improved without changing its fundamental 
> nature.

To me the fundamental nature of C is:

1. I can visually imagine how the code maps onto the hardware

2. I am not bound to a complicated runtime