Is Override Still Mandatory?

[Rob T]

On Wednesday, 14 November 2012 at 08:04:55 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
  but I'm one of
> the Phobos
> developers. It's fine if you use master (it could help us find 
> regressions if
> nothing else), but I wouldn't really advise using it just to be 
> able to use
> the -di flag.

There have been a few other recent bug fixes that have been 
giving me enough headaches for me to want to try it it out. By 
the looks of things, if I'm to make real use out of D, I'll have 
to learn how to fix D as well.

>
> Also, some of us are hoping that the change to deprecated will 
> be reverted in
> favor of making it so that warnings will be the default for 
> using deprecated

Yes, that's what makes the most sense.

> symbols rather than having error be the default. Having -di is 
> nice, but it
> really doesn't fix much. The main problem (at least from the 
> library writer's
> point of view) is that deprecating anything instantly breaks 
> the code of
> anyone using that the now deprecated symbol. -di makes it so 
> that a programmer
> can protect themselves from that, but it still shackles the 
> library writer
> such that they can't deprecate anything if they don't ever want 
> to break
> anyone's code without giving more warning that a note in the 
> changelog or
> documentation.

This subject always makes me think of Python, however, it also 
reminds me of the trap C++ fell into. Personally, I prefer 
dealing with a few breaking changes now and then rather than 
sticking with not-so-good decisions forever. In terms of man 
hours wasted, sticking with a poor design choice can eat up far 
more man hours over the years than the time taken to deal with a 
real fix. But I do understand both sides of the coin having been 
there myself. IMO, so long as you can stick with an older version 
of the compiler and library for legacy code, you're OK. You guys 
may want to ensure that older version of a library and compiler 
can easily co-exist on the same OS installation as a part of the 
solution to the deprecation breakage dilemma. If a programmer 
could choose both the compiler version, and a library version for 
importing into his source code, that would be excellent.

--rt