Import concerns revisited

Dave Dave_member at pathlink.com
Sun Jul 9 15:34:23 PDT 2006


John Reimer wrote:
> An excellent post.  I feel much the same as Sean about the reason it is so
> difficult to "convince" in relation to the import syntax issue.  It is about
> aesthetics to a great extent.  But I think the aesthetics are very important in
> this situation because it decides how D appears to those trying to understand
> the language.
> 
> I aslo share Seans feelings concerning the alias attribute.  "alias" is a great
> addition to the D langauge.  Perhaps I was unclear in my last response to
> Walter: alias, in itself, is not a hack in the general case.  But I believe it
> is laborious and ugly when used in the context of modules and imports.
> 
> D should be elegant.  Using alias and static import comes across as a verbose
> workaround when one is working with multiple module imports; in all other cases,
> it may be equivalent, but I think it's just plain ugly in comparison to the
> alternative syntax using with/as or from/as.  It accomplishes something that
> could be greatly simplified with an addition of a minor syntax expansion.
> 

Excellent summation.

> -JJR
> 
> In article <e8rk68$1fat$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Sean Kelly says...
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> kris wrote:
>>>> The use of alias, regarding imports, should very likely be kept to a 
>>>> bare minimum in anything other than Q&D development. Ideally zero.
>>> I really don't understand your pov. I can't help but think you regard 
>>> alias as like C++'s #define:
>>>
>>>     alias foo bar;
>>>     #define bar foo
>>>
>>> Such #define's I would agree are a terrible hack that don't belong in 
>>> professional code. But aliasing isn't like that, it's a sane and 
>>> well-behaved replacement.
>> I think Kris was merely suggesting that the need for a separate alias 
>> declaration for each import was the problem, not the idea of aliasing 
>> itself.  If a particular module imports 10 others, that's 10 separate 
>> aliases required as well, and there's no good way to write them in a way 
>> that makes for easy readability and maintenance.  This is the point he 
>> was trying to make below.
>>
> 
> <snip great post content>
> 
> 



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