30-10-2010, 01:41 PM
Abstract
The D programming language, also known simply as D, is an object-oriented, imperative, multi-paradigm system programming language designed byWalter Bright of Digital Mars. It originated as a re-engineering of C++, but even though it is predominantly influenced by that language, it is not a variant of C++. D has redesigned some C++ features and has been influenced by concepts used in other programming languages, such as Java, Python, C#, andEiffel.
Features
D is being designed with lessons learned from practical C++ usage rather than from a theoretical perspective. Even though it uses many C/C++ concepts it also discards some, and as such is not compatible with C/C++ source code. It adds to the functionality of C++ by also implementing design by contract, unit testing, true modules, garbage collection, first class arrays, associative arrays,dynamic arrays, array slicing, nested functions, inner classes, closures, anonymous functions, compile time function execution, lazy evaluation and has a reengineered template syntax. D retains C++'s ability to do low-level coding, and adds to it with support for an integrated inline assembler. C++ multiple inheritance is replaced by Java style single inheritance with interfaces and mixins. D's declaration, statement and expression syntax closely matches that of C++. The inline assembler typifies the differences between D and application languages like Java and C#. An inline assembler lets programmers enter machine-specific assembly code within standard D code—a technique often used by system programmers to access the low-level features of the processor needed to run programs that interface directly with the underlying hardware, such as operating systems and device drivers.
D has built-in support for documentation comments, allowing automatic documentation generation.
Programming paradigms
D supports three main programming paradigms—imperative, object-oriented, and metaprogramming.
D 2.0 adds two programming paradigms - functional, concurrent (Actor model).
Imperative
Imperative programming in D is almost identical to C. Functions, data, statements, declarations and expressions work just as in C, and the C runtime library can be accessed directly. Some notable differences between D and C in the area of imperative programming include D's foreach loop construct, which allows looping over a collection, and nested functions, which are functions that are declared inside of another and may access the enclosing function's local variables.
Object oriented
Object oriented programming in D is based on a single inheritance hierarchy, with all classes derived from class Object. D does not support multiple inheritance; instead, it uses Java-style interfaces, which are comparable to C++ pure abstract classes, and mixins, which allow separating common functionality out of the inheritance hierarchy. Additionally, D 2.0 allows declaring static and final (non-virtual) methods in interfaces
Reference:http://en.wikipediawiki/D_(programming_language)
