Tango Style: Struct with no members?

[Don]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 6:58 AM, Benji Smith <dlanguage at benjismith.net> wrote:
>> I've been reading a lot of the Tango source code lately, to educate myself
>> on how the library works, and more generally, how to write good idiomatic D
>> code.
>>
>> As I've looked around, I've noticed a peculiar idiom popping up again and
>> again that I've never seen or heard of before: struct definitions with no
>> member fields, only functions. You can see it in "tango.time.WallClock" or
>> "lib.common.tango.core.Runtime".
>>
>> What's the rationale behind that?
>>
>> I suppose it's something like a class with nothing but static methods. But
>> then why not just define a module with only free functions? Is there a
>> hidden benefit to implementing a pseudo-module as an empty struct?
> 
> It prevents namespace pollution.  In general you don't want to have a
> bunch of generically named functions like "getTime" floating around in
> the top level namespace.  A user *can* do static or renamed import to
> prevent this, but since those are not the default, most users don't do
> that. In C++ you'd do the same thing with an explicit namespace, but D
> doesn't have a namespace construct separate from module namespaces.
> You have to use a struct or template to get that sort of effect.
> 
> --bb

Those structs date from before static import existed, when you HAD to do 
that. I wonder if they are still necessary?