* * * * *

            “Great, just what I need … another D in programming.”

> D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power
> and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of
> modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the
> needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and
> reliability.
>
> D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's
> multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template
> metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look
> and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this
> comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java.
>

“D Programming Language [1]”

D [2] looks to be a very interesting language. Take the C/C++ syntax, remove
header files entirely (A Good Thing™) and use a Javaesque “import” statement,
salt with native string support (not the C/C++ halfbaked NUL terminated
character arrays, nor the Java string class with special dispensation from
the compiler), add in Pascal's nested functions, and LISP's anonymous
functions, bake in garbage collection and contract programming, Haskel's lazy
evaluation of parameters [3] and you have D (with some other stuff [4] I've
left out).

All that, and it's written by a guy who's implemented a compiler or two [5]
and there currently exist two implemented compilers, the native one [6] and a
frontend for GCC (Gnu Compiler Compiler) [7] makes this a rather serious
attempt at a new language.

I'm impressed.

The only complaint I have of the language is the lack of concurrency support
at the langauge level. Ten years ago it might not have been much of a loss,
but today, the trend towards multiple CPU (Central Processing Units)s [8]
makes this almost unexcusable.

Still, it's an impressive language.

[1] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
[2] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
[3] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lazy-
[4] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html
[5] http://www.walterbright.com/
[6] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/dcompiler.html
[7] http://dgcc.sourceforge.net/
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/02/18.1

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