In my opinion, there is not any single, huge feature in D that makes it better than C++.  Yet there are an abundance of little features that make things easier, including:

* Garbage collection
* Native support for arrays
* Delegates
* Function literals
* "import" instead of "include"
* No need to have separate .c and .h files
etc...

D's great strength is that a C++ programmer can pick it up in an afternoon and dabble with it a bit.  He doesn't have to go take a class, or read volumes of documentation, to understand the code.  D is so close to C++ that the jump is easy to make.

Yet, once you've used D, it's really hard to go back to C++.  All those little tiny features suddenly seem like glaring flaws in C++.

I had the same experience with going back to C after using C++.  The two big things I remembered were the fact that you couldn't declare variables midway in your function (in C, you have to declare them at the top of a block) and that you always had to use the "struct" prefix in front of struct typenames.  These are TINY things.  But after using C++, I was irritated to have to go back to C and live without these things.

I suspect it will be the same way with D.  I don't expect D to "kill C++" or anything like that.  But I do expect there to be a slow, steady stream of programmers moving from C++ to D.  I don't expect that many of them will want to move back.

Russ

"Matthew" <admin@stlsoft.dot.dot.dot.dot.org> wrote in message news:ccptp5$20ei$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "David Barrett" <dbarrett@quinthar.com> wrote in message news:ccphb7$1dsr$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > "Andy Friesen" <andy@ikagames.com> wrote in message news:ccp9ii$135u$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > > I think the pivotal aspect will be the tools.  I spent some time
playing
> > > with MS's new C# Express beta, and the editor alone made a boring, crippled language easy, even fun, to write. (particularly the refactoring tools) Visual C++ pales in comparison, and the complexity
of
> > > the language lends little hope for it ever catching up.
> >
> > Speaking of tools, I think a great D feature is it's ability to work
with
> > HTML seamlessly.  I'd like to see what an IDE could do with this.  Screw Doxygen -- just make the source code and the documentation the same
thing!
> > Embed UML state diagrams right into comments.  Create RSS feeds for file changes.  Who knows, but I think there are some cool possibilities that would be hard to match with other languages.
>
> Can you give a 1-para synopsis of RSS for an old thickie?
>

I don't know too much about it, but it's basically a standardized format (using XML, I think) to publish tidbits of information, like blogs or news headlines.   So, a Blog might have an "RSS Feed", which is just an XML formatted-version of the blog that can be downloaded and parsed by an RSS-reader (just like HTML is downloaded and parsed by a Web browser).

Anyway, I was thinking somehow D, or Subversion, or some IDE, or some combination of all three could publish RSS feeds on a per-method/class/module basis, and then using standard RSS readers you could keep up to date on what has changed.  You could subscribe to whichever feeds you were interested in (such as whichever libraries and modules you use).

I think there are some scripts to generate RSS feeds from CVS checkins; I really don't know much about it.

-david

Subversion, much like CVS has hooks that you can program to execute utilities when certain events occur.  If there's enough interest, I'll throw something together for dsource.org.

BA

David Barrett wrote:
> 
> I don't know too much about it, but it's basically a standardized format
> (using XML, I think) to publish tidbits of information, like blogs or news
> headlines.   So, a Blog might have an "RSS Feed", which is just an XML
> formatted-version of the blog that can be downloaded and parsed by an
> RSS-reader (just like HTML is downloaded and parsed by a Web browser).
> 
> Anyway, I was thinking somehow D, or Subversion, or some IDE, or some
> combination of all three could publish RSS feeds on a
> per-method/class/module basis, and then using standard RSS readers you could
> keep up to date on what has changed.  You could subscribe to whichever feeds
> you were interested in (such as whichever libraries and modules you use).
> 
> I think there are some scripts to generate RSS feeds from CVS checkins; I
> really don't know much about it.
> 
> -david
> 
> 

I think that would be most useful for a team of D programmers.  I'm just doing it solo, and only experimenting at that, so it wouldn't be useful for me yet.  Thanks for offering, however.

-david

"Brad Anderson" <brad@dsource.dot.org> wrote in message news:ccu60f$1tvn$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Subversion, much like CVS has hooks that you can program to execute utilities when certain events occur.  If there's enough interest, I'll throw something together for dsource.org.
>
> BA
>
> David Barrett wrote:
> >
> > I don't know too much about it, but it's basically a standardized format (using XML, I think) to publish tidbits of information, like blogs or
news
> > headlines.   So, a Blog might have an "RSS Feed", which is just an XML formatted-version of the blog that can be downloaded and parsed by an RSS-reader (just like HTML is downloaded and parsed by a Web browser).
> >
> > Anyway, I was thinking somehow D, or Subversion, or some IDE, or some combination of all three could publish RSS feeds on a per-method/class/module basis, and then using standard RSS readers you
could
> > keep up to date on what has changed.  You could subscribe to whichever
feeds
> > you were interested in (such as whichever libraries and modules you
use).
> >
> > I think there are some scripts to generate RSS feeds from CVS checkins;
I
> > really don't know much about it.
> >
> > -david
> >
> >

Ben Hinkle wrote:
> David Barrett wrote:
> 
> 
>>"Andy Friesen" <andy@ikagames.com> wrote in message
>>news:ccp9ii$135u$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>>
>>>I think the pivotal aspect will be the tools.  I spent some time playing
>>>with MS's new C# Express beta, and the editor alone made a boring,
>>>crippled language easy, even fun, to write. (particularly the
>>>refactoring tools) Visual C++ pales in comparison, and the complexity of
>>>the language lends little hope for it ever catching up.
>>
>>Speaking of tools, I think a great D feature is it's ability to work with
>>HTML seamlessly.  I'd like to see what an IDE could do with this.  Screw
>>Doxygen -- just make the source code and the documentation the same thing!
>>Embed UML state diagrams right into comments.  Create RSS feeds for file
>>changes.  Who knows, but I think there are some cool possibilities that
>>would be hard to match with other languages.
>>
>>-david
> 
> 
> Has anyone really tried using the HTML feature? The example
> dmd/samples/d/hello2.html isn't a great example (IMHO) since the code has
> html tags to turn parts of it blue and working with code in a text editor
> that has the coloring *built-in* to the file is nasty; instead the coloring
> should be done by the editor and some style-guides. I'd rather see an
> example where the HTML stuff is used for the comments and the code remains
> pure text. Another advantage of doxygen is that it creates all the
> hyperlinks and cross-referencing automatically so you don't have to do it
> all by hand.

Actually, I've used DMD to compile quite a few HTML files -- mostly just for fun. Some of the stuff gets tedious when coding by hand, but it's not a big deal to get a tool to generated HTML.

I've ported Pavel's D2HTML from the early days of D to PHP for the tutorials at dsource. Each example page should be compilable just by adding .html to the filename and sending to DMD. Seems like a neat trick to me.

-- 
Justin (a/k/a jcc7)
http://jcc_7.tripod.com/d/