Why is D unpopular?
Walter Bright
newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Sun May 1 09:04:11 UTC 2022
On 5/1/2022 12:33 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> First Lisp compiler was in 1960's....
I know. And Lisp 1 was an interpreter, page 9 of:
http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
I know perfectly well that interpreters have long evolved to generate native
code. I did one myself (Symantec's Java) in the 1990s. I considered it for the
Javascript interpreter I wrote around 2000.
I've also seen C interpreters in the 1980s. Why native C compilers still didn't
add interpretation to functions is a mystery. The UCSD P-System had interpreting
compilers for C, Pascal, and Fortran in the 1980s.
***** Note that even the C interpreters would reject things like: `int
a[foo()];` i.e. CTFE was not part of the *language* semantics. *****
After D did it, suddenly the other native languages moved in that direction. If
you have another explanation for the timing, I'd like to hear it.
If you have a reference to a natively compiled language specification that had
compile-time constant-expressions that could interpret a function at compile
time, I'd appreciate it. No, not an interpreted language that JITs whatever it can.
Thanks!
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