remove keywords

Walter Bright newshound1 at digitalmars.com
Fri Dec 7 12:17:37 PST 2007


Lutger wrote:
> For example, there's nothing magical 
> about the debug keyword as far as I know, it could just be replaced with 
> version(Debug). But it's nice that everybody uses the same thing for the 
> same purpose.

You're quite right in your assessment of the debug conditional. It stems 
from my experience (and that of some managers who begged me for this) 
that every C/C++ project has their own, unique, way of building for 
debug. It's not that any of them are wrong, it's just that they're all 
different. No standardized convention has ever emerged, yet all these 
debug schemes essentially do the same thing.

Providing a standard means of debug compilation means:

1) Projects developed by different groups will naturally gravitate 
towards using it, rather than invent their own, aiding source code 
portability.

2) Programmers can move from project to project with one less coding 
convention they must relearn.

3) Standardized tools can be developed to manipulate the debug compilations.

4) A standardized scheme is something that can be enforced by larger 
organizations.



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