I find it amazing that you find five characters (the space is optional) for lambdas too long -- heck, the proper name of the feature is longer then that. OTOH, while I find them useful from time to time, they aren't a basic feature of my code often.

OTOH, I would include the ability to do predictable memory layouts and pointer arithmetic as at least something that is very nice to have. OTOH, perl has these, via pack.

I wouldn't inlcude higher-order functions on my list because they are a neccessary side-effect of coderefs as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, I would include a CPAN, or something close to it... but I would also note that I consider apt-get, and even similar (but worse) repositories of other distributions, close enough to CPAN to count, at least for C and C++. Freshmeat and even sourceforge are also vaugely close.

Easy foreaches are also important, even across somewhat abstract list-like things, which leaves out C, C++, and Java, so far as I know.

Really, though, the number one requirement for a language (beyond obvious stuff like turing-completeness) is hashes.

In reply to Re: Indispensible language features by theorbtwo
in thread Indispensible language features by FoxtrotUniform

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