dmd 2.063 beta 5

[Walter Bright]

On 5/23/2013 6:01 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 5/23/13 8:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/23/2013 5:35 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> What about making it an error UNLESS you pass a compiler flag. The
>>> user will be
>>> informed, and the new behavior (which I find useful) is possible.
>>
>> While that idea has significant merit, I oppose it on the following
>> grounds:
>>
>> 1. It forces a very abrupt change. We've followed a policy of gradual
>> change, giving people plenty of time to adapt their codebase. This does
>> not.
>
> I don't understand this. It's change under 100% user control.

Under neither position of the switch is the old runtime behavior maintained. And 
as I mentioned in another post, the naive (or tired or in a hurry) user just 
throwing the switch to get his code to compile runs the risk of silent breakage 
of the runtime behavior.

Furthermore, when we rename a Phobos function, we don't just delete the old 
name. We go through a period of warnings and deprecations.

I don't believe this change is so needed to justify such an abrupt change. It's 
a minor improvement.


>> 2. Having optional errors like that leads to unfortunate problems inside
>> generic code that tests whether some constructs compile or not.
>
> The warning has the same problem.

I don't agree that because we have this problem elsewhere, that it should be 
acceptable to add in more cases.