On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Sorry, no. We are opposed to having compiler flags define
language semantics.
If done excessively, I could certainly see that. But outside of
new languages that haven't gotten to that point yet, I don't know
of any that don't have compiler/runtime flags of this sort. E.g.
Java, Perl, C, C++, PHP, etc. I would be curious why you think D
can escape this fate?
The only alternatives are:
1. Adding new syntax for things that are effectively the same
(e.g. typedef vs phobos typedef) until the language definition is
so long and full of so many variants that code by different
people is mutually unintelligible, depending on when that person
started learning the language, and the language starts to look
like Perl with all the various symbols used to denote every other
thing.
2. Deciding the language is perfect, regardless of whether it has
ever reached a state that draws in clients.
