larsivi

This morning, Walter posted the announcement for DMD 2.000 together with one for DMD 1.016. According to Walter, the fork is now official, although to be a bit pedantic, it's really a branch. Prior to D 1.0, DMD's versions stayed in the 0.x range, so I'm a bit confused by the choice of 2.000 for the first version number for something that Walter says should be considered to be in an alpha state.

The new version don't have too many new features, although the const one is notable in itself. For a better explanation on how it works, read Daniel's post on it (how dare he write excellent posts on everything D?). What I am somewhat baffled over, is that Walter didn't do const-by-default, even though every single person making a statement in Jarrett's poll post wanted it (or at least try it since we're in alpha anyways).

The other change, which is minor all things considered, but concerns us in the Tango camp somewhat, is the new string aliases, string, dstring and wstring. Given that these are just aliases for constified char/dchar/wchar arrays, I find the naming to still be fairly non-descript and rather ambigious.

On a rather interesting note, in the new final const documentation, there is an example with a struct having a constructor. There are quite a few classes in Tango that would have been structs if only they could have constructors, so here's to hope that they will enter D in a more concrete fashion soon :) Edit: Walter just said "Yes" to this, so yay!

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