bool (was DConf 2019 AGM Livestream)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:58:58 PM MDT Nicholas Wilson via Digitalmars-d-
announce wrote:
> On Sunday, 12 May 2019 at 14:50:33 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > On 5/12/19 1:34 PM, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> >> However in this case the community consensus is that the chain
> >> of reasoning you have used to arrive at your decision is wrong.
> >
> > It's a simple enough matter to be understood, and reasonable to
> > assume Walter is not missing any important facts or details.
> > Poking holes in his explanations is, I confess, attractive, but
> > ultimately are about debate skills rather than technical. I do
> > agree that the way explanations on DIP decisions go could and
> > should be improved a lot.
>
> Then let me rephrase my complaints as a question (to you, Walter
> and the community):
>
> At what level of egregiousness of the degree to which the
> unanimous community consensus believes both your decision and
> chain of reasoning are fundamentally wrong, do we, the community,
> decide to reject your position completely and implement the
> community consensus?

Anyone is free to fork the language at any time, but unless you're going to
try to get Walter to step down, he's in charge of D, and he has the final
say. It's obviously problematic if he makes a bad decison and no one can
convince him otherwise, but if you can't convince him of something, and
you're so convinced that he's wrong that you want to effectively take the
decision away from him, then that basically comes down to forking the
language or getting him to step down. The language and its implementation
are certainly a cooperative effort, but ultimately, it's not a democracy.
Walter is the one in charge, and it's his decision. He's chosen to share his
position on some level with Andrei (and now Atila), but it's his language.

Personally, I think that bool should never be treated as an integral value
rather than always treated as an integral value or partially treated as an
integral value. The current behavior is arguably a bad legacy from C/C++,
and it definitely causes bugs. So, I'm quite disappointed with the rejection
of this DIP. But I honestly don't think that this is a big enough issue to
effectively start discussing how or when we take the decision making power
away from Walter. Unless someone can come up with a way to convince Walter
to view bools differently (which I very much doubt is going to happen), I
think that it's quite clear that we're just going to have to learn to
continue to live with the status quo on this issue.

- Jonathan M Davis