The D Programming Language (was: St

[mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu]

I find it hard to believe that a successor to C is needed or would be
appreciated. I come to this as a former 100% Fortran (and assembler)
programmer who now uses C about 80 % of the time. C does have a few,
minor defects (for instance, I will never , ever understand the syntax
of declarations; I have had a guru make up a huge chart listing dozens of
them, which I carry in my wallet.) So does every other language. C does
one thing extremely well: convert the heart of the machine operations of
a byte-addressible, conventional processor (i.e. the PDP11) into a nice
higher language. It is pleasantly compact, and very full of nice
shortcuts (e.g. "string"[i] ). If you dislike C , try other languages:
Fortran, Pascal, Ada ,Modula 2. Me, well , I like C and Fortran and loathe
the rest. But if a new language is to be designed, and done really well, it
won't be done by committee. For the perfect example look in comp.lang.fortran
and read about 88tran, the totally new language with two heads, brought
to you by X3J3.