does D compatibility with C restrict D from evolving ?
and if D drop this will that prevent complexity?

On 09/18/2011 10:08 PM, %u wrote:
> does D compatibility with C restrict D from evolving ?

Binary compatibility as in extern(C) certainly does not. As to source-level compatibility, the only "guarantee" that Ds design gives is that C code will either compile as D code with identical semantics or not compile at all. The only thing that restricts a language from evolving is compatibility with the existing code base for that language.

> and if D drop this will that prevent complexity?

You mean, "does C compatibility impose additional complexity on the D language?" ?

I am sure it does not, C is quite basic. And as I said, not every C program is also valid D code. That is both an advantage and a disadvantage in comparison to C++.

Timon Gehr:

> As to source-level compatibility, the only "guarantee" that Ds design gives is that C code will either compile as D code with identical semantics or not compile at all.

In practice there are few differences, try to compile this in C and D, swapping the import/include:

import core.stdc.stdio;
//#include "stdio.h"
float a[1];
void foo(float v[1]) {
    v[0]++;
}
int main() {
    foo(a);
    printf("%f\n", a[0]);
    return 0;
}

Bye,
bearophile