I wrote an AR archive (.a files) parser in D

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Monday, 19 August 2024 at 08:27:39 UTC, Renato wrote:

> Anyway, this may be interesting to language nerds like me :) if 
> D attracts me, and others who like D have similar preferences 
> as me, perhaps these other languages may be interesting to you 
> guys as well.

I was using Common Lisp before D. It was clearly from a different 
time period, which I blame on the language becoming standardized 
and the users bludgeoning anyone that dared to suggest things 
should be updated, since the language was divinely inspired. 
Names like set, setq, setf, princ, prin1, mapcar, mapcan, and 
mapl were more than I could handle.

I really liked Clojure. The problem was that you're stuck with 
the JVM, which for my work made it useless (they intentionally 
crippled C interop). Scheme is fun to use, but it always felt 
like it was missing functionality, and the code was fairly slow.

S-expressions have always felt like the natural way to write 
code. I've considered writing an s-expression syntax for D. Then 
I would be able to change the language if I didn't like it. (I 
know Walter's opinion on this, I just happen to disagree, because 
that strategy results in a good language for the guy that writes 
the compiler but less so for everyone else. I've always felt the 
main problem with Lisp was people writing bad code, not the 
things the language let you do.)