• the Novice Student (6/6) Jul 24 2004 Hello dear fellows!
• Andy Friesen (9/15) Jul 24 2004 The really short version:
• Elephant (4/22) Jul 24 2004 I disagree, i think the two differ alot, for me its about built in dyami...
• Russ Lewis (17/25) Jul 24 2004 From the programmer's perspective, you are right; D has a lot of cool

the Novice Student <the_member pathlink.com> writes:

Hello dear fellows!
I want to ask the great community about the purposes and roles of D besides
Systems Programming because this attribute of D is overshadowing its other
characteristics.
Is D a true general-purpose programming language ?
thanking you , Irfan.

Andy Friesen <andy ikagames.com> writes:

the Novice Student wrote:
 Hello dear fellows!
 I want to ask the great community about the purposes and roles of D besides
 Systems Programming because this attribute of D is overshadowing its other
 characteristics.
 Is D a true general-purpose programming language ?
 thanking you , Irfan.

The really short version:

D is a simpler C++: it's easier to write and easier for compiler vendors 
to implement.  It's useful for pretty much anything C++ is.

Naturally, there are things C++ supports and vice versa, but the core 
feature set is the same.  The programming mentality is only really 
different because D has a garbage collector and built-in support for 
contracts and unit tests.

  -- andy

Elephant <Elephant_member pathlink.com> writes:

The programming mentality is only really 
different because D has a garbage collector and built-in support for 
contracts and unit tests.

I disagree, i think the two differ alot, for me its about built in dyamic
arrays, delegates, built in associative arrays, nested functions, proper support
for interfaces, and an overall much cleaner design.


In article <cdujjr$19gc$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Andy Friesen says...
the Novice Student wrote:
 Hello dear fellows!
 I want to ask the great community about the purposes and roles of D besides
 Systems Programming because this attribute of D is overshadowing its other
 characteristics.
 Is D a true general-purpose programming language ?
 thanking you , Irfan.

The really short version:

D is a simpler C++: it's easier to write and easier for compiler vendors 
to implement.  It's useful for pretty much anything C++ is.

Naturally, there are things C++ supports and vice versa, but the core 
feature set is the same.  The programming mentality is only really 
different because D has a garbage collector and built-in support for 
contracts and unit tests.

  -- andy

Russ Lewis <spamhole-2001-07-16 deming-os.org> writes:

Elephant wrote:
The programming mentality is only really 
different because D has a garbage collector and built-in support for 
contracts and unit tests.

 
 
 I disagree, i think the two differ alot, for me its about built in dyamic
 arrays, delegates, built in associative arrays, nested functions, proper
support
 for interfaces, and an overall much cleaner design.

 From the programmer's perspective, you are right; D has a lot of cool 
features that make programming easier.  However, these are all 
implemented on top of a very C-ish sort of structure.  Every one of the 
"way" cool features can be done somehow in C/C++...it just takes a lot 
more lines of code to do them in the older languages.

Because of this, all new D features are optional.  You can still write 
old, "bare metal," C-style code.  You can even disable (and/or remove!) 
the garbage collector if you want.

Thus, anything you can write in C, you can write in D and expect it to 
work basically the same way.  But you can also use some of D's new 
features, and integrate them right into the C code just fine.

What this means is that D is a powerful, general-purpose language.  It 
has advanced features that let you write high-level code, but it can 
also let you write very low-level code (such as operating system kernels).

In fact, in the future I plan to rewrite a few of the Linux kernel 
source files as a demonstration of how D can interact with C!