On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 15:05:40 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:

On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 14:55:38 UTC, someone wrote:

Please think about the huge math and science community. Most of them I came across like D for its speed and efficiency. But D can never replace Matlab/Octave/Ipython/Scipy because ....

.. of the messy syntax compared to almost math like syntax above languages offer.

For example, if I want to quickly want to plot something, in Octave I would do:

x = linspace(0, 2*pi, 1000);
y = sin(x);
plot(x, y)

I could be mistaken, but those languages don't have the notion of declaration, do they? (honest question)

Last time I tried a similar language, basically, any variable name that is not yet used is resolved to null. Which is why the syntax work.

D on the other hand has a strong notion of declaration, and construction.

I'm not sure it's just a matter of "messy syntax", and more of different paradigms. In D, it is more important to make the distinction of construction/assignment. The syntax is messy, but the new syntax blurs that line.

There's another alternative that fits more with D style which is also very mathsy.

It would be possible to make storage classes work with the colon syntax, ie:

auto:
   x = 1;
   y = 2;
   f = a => a+1
   writeln(f(x) + y);

Also:

immutable:
   x = 3;
   y = 4;

Kind of like option explicit: off in VB