Scott Meyers wants to bring default zero-initialization to C++, mentions TDPL for precedent

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 22 November 2015 at 07:36:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> 15 years ago, everyone loved to bash BASIC as a terrible 
> language. I did too. But then I was looking at some Visual 
> Basic code for a friend, and noticed something I had forgotten 
> - it was really easy to manipulate strings. I was used to the 
> horrible way of dealing with strings in C. I resolved that D 
> had to have strings as nice as BASICs, and pretty much 
> succeeded.

Just about all 8 bit computers shipped with BASIC and it was 
quite reasonable as a scripting language/CLI as Microsoft had a 
relatively memory efficient VM for it.

One could do cool stuff in BASIC by adding small pieces of 
machine language to do the heavy lifting, just like you can with 
Python or Lua today. But the line numbering system was annoying.

(Perl, sed etc are still the most concise languages for string 
manipulation...)