June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
456 pages
14h 48m
English
We programmers tend to dislike excessive separation between built-in types and user-defined types. Endowing built-in types with magic properties works against the openness and extensibility of any language because user-defined types are forever condemned to second-class status. Yet language designers have legitimate reasons to give built-in types the red carpet treatment. One such reason is that a language that’s too configurable becomes difficult to teach and also difficult to parse both by the human and by the machine. Each language tries to strike a good balance between the built-in and the configurable, some making it a point to get close to one of the two extremes.
D’s take on the matter is pragmatic: it ...