Jokes aside, I think people in language-debates often forget that
high-level languages are really just layers of syntactical sugar over
machine-code. ASM is syntactical sugar over machince-code, C is
syntactical sugar over ASM, and D is mostly syntactic sugar over C.
They are merely ways to streamline certain programming-models, into a
language that encourages those idioms and constructs. Just about
anything that can be written in D, can be written with equivalent
semantics in C, but the D-version is likely to be faster to write, and
faster to comprehend.
The purpose of higher-level languages is to encourage "good"
programming style and readability. Period. The syntax is crucial here,
it determines which constructs will become readable, and which won't,
which in turn determines the mind-set of the programmer. Which is why
I consider syntactic sugar to be seriously under-appreciated and
undervalued in many language decisions.
One argument i often encounter about features, syntax in language
discussions is "What namespaces can do that namespace_func can't?".
Answer might be pretty obvious to many, but consider the corner cases of
some namespace implementations. (C++ here)
You simply can't provide a clean library with the given namespace features.
---
namespace ns1 {
class A;
....
}
namespace ns2 {
class C {
A* pa;
};
}
---
but in D it is quite elegant.
---
module ns2;
private import ns1;
class C {
A* pa;
};
---
