Why does std.string use public imports?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On 2011-06-30 17:12, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On 2011-06-30 16:14, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> > I'm referring to these two in std.string:
> > public import std.algorithm : startsWith, endsWith, cmp, count;
> > public import std.array : join, split;
> > 
> > Because whenever I try to use .count in my code:
> > 
> > import std.stdio;
> > import std.string;
> > import std.utf;
> > 
> > void main()
> > {
> > writeln("foo".count);
> > }
> > 
> > std.utf.count conflicts with std.string's publicly imported
> > std.algorithm.count
> > 
> > Can we avoid public imports in modules? The rise of conflicts in
> > Phobos is getting slightly annoying.
> 
> I believe that they're there because the functions in question used to be
> in std.string but were generalized and moved to other modules. So, rather
> than immediately break code, they were publicly imported in std.string.
> They're scheduled for deprecation and will be removed once the deprecation
> process has completed. However, they shouldn't be causing conflicts. It's
> probably due to a bug related to explicit imports being seen as new
> functions in the module that they're imported into (I forget the bug
> number). Maybe using static imports with aliases would fix the problem.

Actually, now that I look at it more closely, the problem that you're seeing 
is fully expected and desired. It's complaining that std.string has a count 
function and that std.utf has a count function and that it doesn't know which 
to use. That's exactly what's supposed to happen when two modules have 
functions which conflict. std.string has had a count function for a long time. 
So, this is the behavior that you would have seen for a long time. 
std.string's count has been generalized and moved to std.algorithm, so you're 
going to get the same conflict between std.algorithm.count and std.utf.count - 
which is expected. The public import is part of the deprecation and will go 
away eventually. At that point, std.string and std.utf will no longer conflict 
for count, because std.string won't have a count function anymore. But there's 
no bug here. What you're seeing here is exactly what std.string and std.utf 
have been doing for some time. It's a natural side effect of using the same 
function name in multiple modules. Using the full module path for the function 
fixes the problem (though it doesn't work with the member function call syntax 
in that case). It's how the module system works and fully expected.

- Jonathan M Davis