On Friday, 13 December 2013 at 05:22:26 UTC, Ross Hays wrote:
Yeah, is-expression syntax is one of the dark, ugly corners of
D that
unfortunately we're stuck with, because changing it now will
totally
break a LOT of code for merely cosmetic reasons. I honestly
wish that
one day this mess could be cleared up, though I'm not holding
my breath
for it.
T
I know this is probably obvious, but if D were allowed to just
make one big breaking change for D3 or something, and fix every
dark corner it has. Would that really be so bad? I know it
would break things but... I kind of long for it.
I'm sympathetic to this POV, or something similar. For example, a
multiyear plan to deprecate the 'is' syntax and replace it with
something better, in the current D. I'm not a fan of gratuitous
changes which make the language unstable, but if there were a
pleasing design to replace 'is' I'd like to think that D users
could change the relevant sources given a long enough deprecation
window.
Changing every dark corner and every poor choice is too much. For
instance, a lot of people think that immutability and 'nothrow'
should have been the default, but changing that would be dramatic
and probably will have to wait for a D3 or new language.
-- Brian
