eliminate junk from std.string?

[Walter Bright]

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> Agreed. So what's wrong with improving things and leaving old things as aliases?

Clutter.

One of the risks with Phobos development is it becoming a river miles wide, and 
only an inch deep. In other words, endless gobs of shallow, trite functions, 
with very little depth. (Aliases are as shallow as they get!)

As a general rule, I don't want functionality in Phobos that takes more time for 
a user to find/read/understand the documentation on than to reimplement it 
himself. Those things give the illusion of comprehensiveness, but are just 
useless wankery.

Do we really want a 1000 page reference manual on Phobos, but no database 
interface? No network interface? No D lexer? No disassembler? No superfast XML 
parser? No best-of-breed regex implementation? No CGI support? No HTML parsing? 
No sound support? No jpg reading?

I worry by endless bikeshedding about perfecting the spelling of some name, we 
miss the whole show.

I'd like to see more meat. For example, Don has recently added gamma functions 
to the math library. These are hard to implement correctly, and are perfect for 
inclusion.