Stroustrup on the Future of C++

/ASCII writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++, has written an essay [PDF] on the features of the upcoming C++0x standard. In his essay, he argues that new features should whenever possible go into the standard library and not into the language, but that the language needs to shave of a few rough corners to make it easier to use for novices."

Comments

Features I want...

[BAILOPAN]

I program in C++ from dawn to dusk, and a few things really irk me about it:

1. Member function pointers. Implementation dependent and messy syntax that few people even know about. Their use is limited, and they don't support delegates like C#, making them ugly to work with.

2. The "virtual =0" syntax instead of something nice like "abstract" or "interface" is just weird. How can you set a prototype equal to 0? What's wrong with nice words?

3. Operator new and delete were designed by someone on crack. The only way to call a constructor is with placement new, whose syntax looks like: new (var) type(). Placement delete, however, doesn't call the destructor, which must be invoked manually. Furthermore, delete can't take parameters like new. What.

4. There is a "typeid" operator but no "typeof" operator. GCC has an extension for this, but it's not standard C++ I think.

I'm sure there are other language constructs that have annoyed me, and if you don't read my mind and fix them, Bjarne, I will kick you in the pants!