> > That's all gone in modern Pascal dialects. Delphi is very similar to D; > it's practically a Pascal version of D. The OOP features are the same, > except for some small differences, which make Delphi a bit more flexible > (virtual and named constructors...). > > The only thing that was really lacking in Delphi are templates. But for > compensation, it had powerful RTTI. Try writing a > reflection/serialization mechanism in D that's as powerful Delphi's. I > bet you won't succeed, not even with D2. (Need to fix some compiler bugs > or deficiencies in the area of __traits first.) Even if you succeed, the > end result will be probably harder to use. (If that sounds polemic, show > me a D library that implements full serialization on > Delphi/Java/whatever level, and I'll shut up.)
Other interesting features of Delphi were: - incredibly fast compilation time allowed by the language, you can almost develop in release mode - properties "done right", with zero overhead (but cumbersome to write) - similar productivity and feeling that D can provide - very good low-level bit manipulation: absolute prevent all union tricks, "value" type casts are reinterpret_cast (no way to turn a float into an int silently), inline-assembly like D - "Borland fastcall", using the three registers EAX, ECX and EDX
