Semantics of toString

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:13:06 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>>> Let's not forget that this is mainly for debugging...
>>> If it's mainly for debugging maybe it's not worth spending time on.
>>  Nonsense!  Developers spend a lot of time debugging.  Helping people
>> debug their programs is certainly worth spending time on.
>>  --bb
>
> Sorry sorry. I just meant to say it's not worth coming with an airtight  
> design. We might afford some extra conversions and extra virtual calls I  
> guess.
>
> But that being said, I'd so much want to start thinking of an actual  
> text serialization infrastructure. Why develop one later with the  
> mention "well use that stuff for debugging only, this is the real stuff."

The main purpose to serialize is to be able to deserialize.  The main  
reason to print debug information is so a person can read it.  I don't  
know if those two goals overlap enough.

I think we need both.  Maybe one uses the other, I'm not sure, but a way  
to say "here's how you interact with writefln and friends" would be very  
nice.

-Steve