Andrei Alexandrescu: > We will need to accommodate multiple implicit conversions somehow anyway > (e.g. multiple alias this entries). This is a great question because it > illustrates how segregating arrays out of the language challenges the > magic that made them "special" and democratizes good features such that > other types can benefit of them too.
Making things more orthogonal can be quite useful and it allows more flexibility, but having common things implemented as magic is sometimes good because you need less knowledge to use the language, you need less time to understand code written by other people (because there are less general ways to do something), and this allows for more sharing of code, and you may cover most of the common usages anyway. So the risk of making things more orthogonal is to over-generalize. Scheme language (that is very orthogonal) shows this failure very well, this is a related quotation: >In practice Scheme follows exactly the opposite route: there are dozens of >different and redundant object systems, module systems, even record systems, >built just by piling up feature over feature. So the minimalism of the core >language is just a lie or at best a red herring (the core language can be >minimalistic, but the core language is basically useless for any real life >job).< The Axioms of C++0x (that in theory the compiler can use to perform optimizations, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++0x#Axioms ) show one example of over-generalization. I think the D2 language may offer just few common Axioms (commutativity, etc), allowing most of the usages of Axioms and avoiding lot of compiler complexity to support them in general. Bye, bearophile
