Hmm. D 2.0 ?

Actually, it's been done before. Anybody ever heard of Solaris-1? Or dBase-I?

They guys at Sun wanted to rename SunOS to something cooler, but knew that whatever-1.0 won't cut it.

George Tate, the owner of Ashton-Tate that released dBase-II was a keen marketer too. First, he decided off-hand to skip 1.0. Then he also renamed the company to a two-person name, so as to hide the fact that it really wasn't a big company. Like something that's already done a major corporate merger. Also, he thought for a good while about the other name. He wanted it to sound Aristocratic, possibly British, or Old Money like.

At the time IBM got their PC out and Bill became a juggernaut, dBase-II was running on a bigger percentage of existing computers than any other database ever since.

By the time I got to hear this, I was using dBase-IV.

None of us couldn't possibly become adept at marketing. We're just too honest.


Kris wrote:
> Since we're now discussing a 1.0 release, I'd like to toss something
> into the pot:
> 
> 1) consider calling it 2.0 ~ we all know the ramifications, and D has
> been around long enough to deserve that status.
> 
> 2) whenever the first official, non-beta release is made, it should
> have addressed all or most of the little niggly things that would be
> hard to clean up later (once people start to use them). This is quite
> different from the various features people wish to see included ~
> instead, it's a little bit of insurance that the /following/ release
> will not upset users in some manner. It helps to smooth the release
> cycle and generates confidence.
> 
> It's up to Walter, of course, but it might be useful to collect a
> list of these little niggly things? In case something is forgotten?
> 
> - Kris
> 
> 
> 
> "Dave" <Dave_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:dnndcn$20rh$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> 
>> "Anders F Björklund" <afb@algonet.se> wrote in message news:dnn82k$1qtu$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> 
>>> BCS wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> I'm not taking a side on this question but "Do we, or do we not
>>>> WANT lots of users of D before it goes 1.0?"
>>> 
>>> When is that ?
>>> 
>>> The D spec was conceived in Dec 1999. That's 6 years ago. The
>>> first DMD alpha was released in Dec 2001, 4 years ago.
>>> 
>> 
>> I know and understand what you're getting at, but the timeframe is
>> about par with how much time it took for other languages to start
>> taking hold too, perhaps even less compared to C++ and Java. Of
>> course, now we are dealing with 'internet time' when it comes to
>> anything new in IT (and we wonder why there is so much crap out
>> there <g>).
>> 
>> What D has done in four years is remarkable when you consider how
>> much was done by one person mostly on free time. C++ had a lot of
>> help from what was then probably the premier CS research
>> organization in the world, and Java had a large and rapidly growing
>> tech. giant behind it.
>> 
>> (I'm not forgetting the major contributions of others here, but no
>> one can argue who's done the great majority of the work)
>> 
>> 
>>> So if I do find someone that would be willing to try D, should
>>> tell them to wait "a little longer" while the language
>>> specification and reference compiler is being worked on ? Or
>>> should I ask them to help out meanwhile ?
>> 
>> I'm telling people all of the time about D, but I do add the caveat
>> that it's 'young' yet, *but* that's usually right before I also add
>> that the language, tools and library are pretty stable, and are
>> great for writing utlities where script just doesn't cut it. The
>> primary problem is that A) I work for clients who drink the
>> Microsoft koolaid or B) work for clients using proprietary Unix
>> systems and tools.
>> 
>> 
>>>> --If something major has to be changed and as a result, axes a
>>>> major project, this would adversely effect the "image" of the
>>>> language.
>>> 
>>> Maybe one should just draw a line in the sand and call it "1.0", and fix the shortcomings in "the first service pack" thereafter.
>>> 
>> 
>> I've got to ask myself "Is the language ready for 1.0, and would
>> this really help the language grow right now?". I'm not sure, but
>> I'm leaning towards "yes" for the first part and "no" for the 2nd
>> at this point. And there's no turning back from the big v1.0
>> release, being that "1.0" seems to carry so much weight with people
>> regarding what decisions are made for a progamming language from
>> that point on.
>> 
>> That said, I'm often wrong in such matters otherwise I wouldn't be
>> here, but in Bermuda or somewhere warm sipping a beer on the beach.
>> I just had to add my $0.02 worth for consideration <g>
>> 
>> 
> 
> 

> Niko Korhonen wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
>> A couple of recent additions to D (type inference and stack allocation) have forked/will fork the language in two, now we have to choose between:
>>
>> auto c = new MyClass();
>> MyClass c = new MyClass(); // Which is better?
>>
...
>>
>> The point that I'm desperately (and rather poorly come to think of it) trying to make is that we should keep the number of lanugage constructs to a bare minimum and absolutely ban any redundant constructs. This helps to keep the language shareable, clean and easy to understand and easy to parse.
>>

These construct are not redundant. The auto construct is needed in templates where the type of an expression is not known until compile time and the explicit  typing is needed when the type of the variable must be something other than the type of the expression. (OK, you can do this with casts but that's just plain ugly)