He appeared also several times in TV in his late years and it was always a delight. He was more a painter as a scientist in his late years but always funny and very nice.
Compound literals are anonymous variables, i.e. like variables except that there is no label visible in the C program. If you look at the assembly you'll see that they are declared exactly like a variable except with a compiler generated internal label.
That's the issue with C++ metaprogramming. It's so unwieldy and complex that the benefits are difficult to see and the occasions to be worthwhile limited. When the language has better (i.e. simpler) facilities for meta-programming like D, it will open big venues where it makes sense to use it.
It is like programming object oriented in C, it is possible to do but so unwieldy and requiring discipline and verbose boiler plate that there's rarely an occasion where it would be interesting to use. While it is much easier to do in C++ or D or Java (etc.) as they provide the abstractions that makes it useable. C++'s meta-programming facilities are not good enough.
I disagree. Object-oriented programming is very easy in C even though the syntax itself doesn't guide you. Essentially, all C code I write is object-oriented. Perhaps you are thinking about dynamic dispatch which indeed is very annoying to implement correctly in C?
<i>D will always evaluate normal "if's" at runtime even if they are comptime-known, it will not do this automatically for you.</i>
WRONG. if in a CTFE function works without problems.
static if has nothing to do with CTFE. static if is conceptually a beefed up proper #ifdef/#endif.
The biggest issue D has is all the FUD and misconceptions that are propagated about it.
Loved my V30 in my Atari ST. The fun part was that it was faster than the 68000 on bus access (3 cycles instead of 4) which allowed with some special drivers to accelerate even operations under TOS.
