Reduce redundancy in alias

[Paul D. Anderson]

Walter Bright Wrote:

> Frank Benoit wrote:
> > I use aliases in many case to import a symbol from somewhere into the 
> > current scope. The identifier remains the same.
> > 
> > For example, alias to override
> > 
> > class D : B {
> >   alias B.foo foo;
> >   void foo( long a ){}
> > }
> > 
> > Or i want to make constant values available from somewhere else
> > import WINTYPES = tango.sys.win32.types;
> > class OS {
> >   alias WINTYPES.WS_TABSTOP WS_TABSTOP;
> >   // 2000 more
> > }
> > 
> > I think, it would be really handy, if i could simply write
> > alias B.foo;
> > 
> > So the rule would be
> > "If a FQN is aliased without an alias symbol name, the last part of the 
> > FQN is taken as the alias symbol name."
> 
> I think this technically will work, but I'm a little uneasy about it.

One problem is that you could intend to create an alias such as 

B.foo bar

but mistakenly omit the alias name:

B.foo

and there would be no indication that an error was made until you tried to use 'bar' somewhere in the code. The error message would tell you it wasn't defined, but not where the mistake was made.

An alternative would be to use a different keyword for this case, such as "brief" or "abbrev" or "unqual". (Or "sobriquet".) Then if an alias was intended but omitted it would still get flagged, and if an unqualified usage was intended but an alias was mistakenly added it would also get flagged.

Paul


Paul