On Mon, Jan 01, 2007 at 05:56:16PM -0500, tom smith wrote:
> This looks to me like a very promising programming language.
> Lots of useful features.
> Smitty
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
It does look like a decent language -- I've looked at it before, a bit
cursorily. GDC is a reasonably recent development; I don't think it
existed when last I looked at D. In fact, I think there was only the
commercial implementation last time I looked, which made it less than
appealing to me (I don't want to have to rely on some corporation's
support of a proprietary compiler when I do any programming).
As things currently stand, however, I'm rather more impressed with
OCaml, even now that D has an open source compiler. Binaries compiled
from OCaml tend to benchmark faster than everything other than C. It
even benchmarks faster than C++ in most cases. Its high-level syntax
makes it almost as succinct as Perl, the only fly in that ointment being
the static typing. Of course, static typing has its advantages
(particularly for binary-compiled executables), and even static typing
doesn't impose nearly as much syntactic overhead as you might expect
because OCaml uses type inference rather than type declaration notation,
and its functional syntax makes type interactions much easier than they
are in C.
All of this in a language that is functional by default, but provides
elegant imperative and object oriented programming support fairly
comprehensively and seamlessly, when you want it. It also supports a
module system for libraries similar to Perl's, and even an interface for
using Perl modules and C libraries. The only real problems with OCaml
are the lack of a complete formal language specification (though the
official documentation pretty much fills that void) and instructional
documentation that is lacking in a number of ways. Of course, D is even
worse off in both respects. All in all, it looks like OCaml will
definitely be the next binary compiled programming language I'll work on
mastering.
Maybe that's just me, though.
-- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.
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