Good point, but still, you can apply operator [] to a and b in some non-C dynamic language, which means the "int a[]" style is probably more relevant psychologically.

I agree that int a[10] feels more natural, though if the brackets are empty my only preference is that the language pick one or the other. Don't make "int[] a;" and "int a[];" equally valid syntax, but totally different semantics.

My main point is that this is a relatively cosmetic issue relative to the ability to use 'foreach' syntax instead of iterator objects and while loops.

C++0x addresses those things -- foreach etc.

There's clearly a market for some sort of a fixed C++ but not the Java/C# way. D tries to fill the niche, but it doesn't give a feeling of elegance or otherwise of something really new and unseen before.

The article only mentions a few of D's features. There are a lot more improvements. The templating system for instance is quite innovative. http://www.digitalmars.com/d/templates-revisited.html Variadic Templestes: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/variadic-function-templates.htm...

But there are other things as well like the lazy evaluation, and built in contract and unit test support.

Ave a look at the articles on this page http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

And the specifications http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lex.html

Templates in D look like just a syntactically polished variation of C++ templates. Of course there are some new features there, but I don't see anything that can't be done with a compiler that is capable of evaluating some functions at compile-time. C++ can't do that, but my point is, why bother creating such a complicated template system for something that can be done the easy way?

Variadic templates: can be done with variant arrays and again, with smart compile-time evaluation if necessary.