On Wednesday, 13 May 2020 at 19:25:43 UTC, welkam wrote:
On Thursday, 7 May 2020 at 09:18:04 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Because D is a re-engineering of C++
I thought it was re-engineering of C
This opinion seems quite common in the D community, but I frankly
don't see it. If you are referring to the D subset defined by the
BetterC switch, well, maybe then I would agree. But not for D in
general.
FFI to C by itself does not make it a "re-engineering of C".
IIRC, Walter wrote somewhere (in the early days of D), that part
of what inspired D was "wondering what C++ would have looked like
if it wasn't constrained by backwards compatibility with C".
Or something to that effect. Let's see what the Wayback machine
has to say:
"D was conceived in December 1999 by myself as a successor to C
and C++..." [1]
"Many new concepts were added to the language with C++, but
backwards compatibility with C was maintained, including
compatibility with nearly all the weaknesses of the original
design. There have been many attempts to fix those weaknesses,
but the compatibility issue frustrates it. ..etc.." [2]
It is actually quite interesting to look at the original goals...
and see where we are now.
[1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20021205114505/http://digitalmars.com/d/index.html
[2]
https://web.archive.org/web/20021205114505/http://digitalmars.com/d/index.html
