Reviewing Phobos

jcc7 technocrat7 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 9 11:01:13 PST 2007


== Quote from Orgoton (arkangath at gmail.com)'s article
> I've been checking out the code of Phobos and I noticed it has the copyright
notice dating 2004 (at least on file.d which is the one I'm currently reviewing).
I've been only adding some documentation and arranging the code to the format
specified on http://www.digitalmars.com/d/dstyle.html but I've been noticing some
occasional "bool" instead of "bit". Also, naming conventions are not followed
(like isfile() instead of isFile()).
> I'd hope I'd get an answer from someone from the D programming language
development team. Should I correct this name conventions as well, or shall I leave
them as they are, and only add Documentation lines and non-code altering stuff
like white spaces and indentation?
> You can mail me an answer if you'd like or reply on the forums.
> Thank a lot.

I think the one and only memeber of the "D programming language development team"
is Walter Bright. If you want to be sure that you're not wasting your time with
your improvements, you need to get a response from him. There's enough traffic on
these newsgroups, so he may not even have read any of your posts on this topic yet.

I think what your doing sounds valuable, but I suspect changing the names of
functions in Phobos is going a lot farther than Walter would be willing to go.
Consistency is great, but changing the capitalization does break code. It might be
a great improvement, but I don't expect Walter to approve that.

The design (or lack of design) of Phobos can be a controversial topic. For
example, I think that the Tango project (http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango)
was started because people being disappointed with Phobos. The Tango developers
have already given up on getting Walter to improve Phobos -- they just want to
replace Phobos altogether.

Of course, I'm not involved in the development of Phobos or Tango, so what do I
know. ;)

jcc7



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