In article <du5hro$2c10$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
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>"Jeremy" <Jeremy_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:du0gvn$98o$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> reference "alleg40.dll"
>> reference "gameclasses.d"
>> reference "libusb.a"
>> reference "phobos.lib"
>>
>> The library type could be extracted by the file extension. That just looks
>> awesome :) You have to agree... :) It must be possible -- and I think that
>> would
>> put D far ahead of the competition... imagine getting a new library --
>> want to
>> install it? Copy hotstuff.xxx to the directory and say 'reference
>> "hotstuff.xxx"' in your Game.d and that's it. Want to compile it? Just say
>> 'dmd
>> Game.d', that's it (assuming the libraries are in the same directory... -I
>> otherwise etc etc.) -- If it isn't a recognizable library, throw a
>> compiler
>> error...
>
>The problem with referencing dll's is that you could only reference functions that accepted and returned basic types. No classes, no enums, no structs, no typedefs.
>

OK, fair enough. But what you can reference, should be this easy. It seems so intuitive to just tell the compiler in one place what file you want to reference. To get around strange library hurdles, you should work with the DDL guys.

Anyway, what Kyle Furlong said in the Bugs forum -- the D language is some really good stuff... but the framework is lacking (libraries, IDEs, tools etc.) -- If it was this easy to "plug" in external sources, more people would plug into it :)

On a somewhat related note -- if I wanted to reference SAPI.DLL to make a speech-enabled program using Microsoft's SAPI interface, which uses some classes TGrammar and whatever -- would I simply just not be able to do this (aside from writing an entire C wrapper library)? Could DDL potentially save me much trouble?

Jeremy