🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <658@manutius.UUCP> garyp@manutius.UUCP (Gary Powell) writes:
>5) "."
>   Lets add this.  I mean really, no one's code will break if we have it,
>   the earth will not shake and the sky fall down.  If it turns out to be
>   not as useful as Jim claims..so what?  We'll drop it from language "D"
>   the next generation.

It would be nice if it were so easy to undo an addition.  (You were
joking, right?)

>Lets get on with it.  Like it or not many of us have to work with C++ even
>though language "X" is better at some other task.  Lets add the features folks
>clamor for.

Those people that I know who dislike C++, dislike it because they
believe it contains too many features (that cannot now be removed).
I know that I don't use the entire language, and neither do the people
that I work with (in fact, we have informal coding standards along the
lines of "avoid X, Y, and Z".)

>We still have a lot of other pressing problems, like how to incorporate 
>persistance, and how to do good garbage collection, and how to at run time
>create objects whose type isn't known until after the program is running.

Don't hold your breath.  Adding persistence will be very hard, because
(if I understand the work going on at U Mass. to add persistence to
Modula-3) persistence is equivalent to having an accurate compacting
garbage collector.  Maybe you are using a different definition of
persistence.  There are other ways to implement garbage collection, so
adding that alone should be easier.  (It has been done for friendly
users, but there are still some hazards involving the optimizer that
people are working on).

David Chase
Sun
(dchase@eng.sun.com)