Language issues

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Revision as of 14:49, 10 March 2014 by Vladimir Panteleev (talk | contribs) (Signed/unsigned comparisons)
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Like any programming language, D is not perfect. This page lists some potential problems that have been brought up and debated throughout the language's history. Fixing these is not straight-forward or may not justify breaking backwards-compatibility. As of the moment of writing this, there are no plans for a major revision of D which would allow such breaking changes, but this list may also be useful for other programming languages which wish to learn from D's experience.

See also: Language design discussions

Properties

Design of properties has been an oft-discussed topic. This language feature has evolved throughout D's history (e.g. the addition and removal of the -property switch. There are numerous DIPs with proposals on improving the design:

See also:

Unicode and ranges

D's ranges currently treat strings in a special way: they present them as a range of code points, thus implicitly performing UTF decoding. Algorithms that do not require working with decoded code points, and which would gain a performance advantage by treating the input as a range of code units (or an array of code units), must incorporate D strings as a special case. This approach complicates the implementation by some degree, and only solves a certain subset of problems for a subset of written languages.

See also:

Signed/unsigned comparisons

(What's the status of this? Issue 259 is open and has an open pull request.)