[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 4 February 2022 at 09:45:31 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Then again, maybe Sun lacked enough people with decades of C 
> and C++ experience, and someone with the track record of 
> Gosling across the computing industry does have any clue about 
> what he was talking about.

I learned about 1s- and 2s-complement at high school in the 
context of digital circuits, but I guess that is unusual.

Regardless, it might take a decade of system level programming to 
get good intuition of C semantics, on that we can agree. Maybe we 
also can agree that most D programmers have no use for that.

And well, why should they? The details are primarily useful for 
very low level trickery and error-prone bit manipulation. With a 
good standard library this should not be needed often. Also, with 
the availability of SIMD I find bithacks to be of very low 
utility. Prior to SIMD I sometimes used unsigned bit hacks to 
emulate SIMD (for image processing), but that is arcane at this 
point in time. I only do such things on the rare occasion where I 
want to create a high precision phasor (oscillator) or treat 
floats as bit-vectors. Most programmers don't need this 
knowledge, they just need a good library.

Anyways, it is a poor strategy to require C-like proficiency as 
that actually makes it easier for D programmers to transition to 
C++!

D needs to evolve towards simplicity, that is the main advantage 
it can obtain over C++ and Rust.