• Jason House <jason.james.house gmail.com> May 18 2009

Jason House <jason.james.house gmail.com> writes:

 
 On a similar note, Andrei, what is this spree of removing features? Ok some
 are obviously bad, imaginary types for example, but why remove other stuff
 such as commplex and with?


 TDPL is coming out. This is quite literally the last chance to shed some 
 old skin. Complex as a built-in does nothing of interest to anyone 
 except a cute syntax for literals that nobody uses (how many remarkable 
 complex literals could you imagine?) About "with"... see above before I 
 die of a heart attack.
 
 The baroque "!<>=" operators became much more attractive since Walter 
 said he's considering making them overloadable.
 
 On the other hand new features are coming, which I believe are "good 
 skin". Narrowing integral conversions will go. Walter is working on a 
 very cool scheme for inferring the range of expressions that makes casts 
 unnecessary in many cases.


Can you give us more detail?

 Casts are a plague not only for safe code, 
 but also for generic code that wants to be scalable and change-robust. 


I'm still hoping that one day D will be able to implicitly cast to scope
invariant... such as when calling pure functions with non-shared data.

On an almost unrelated note, D currently makes it far too easy to share
non-shared data. Kicking off threads with non-unique unshared data is unsafe
but works without casting. That really should get fixed.

 The ease with which C and C++ allow losing state and the drowning 
 necessity of integral casts in Java or C# are both extremes that I'm 
 happy to see D avoid.