Proposal on improvement to deprecated

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, October 02, 2011 10:48:53 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-10-02 07:24, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > There has been a fair bit of discussion about improving deprecated in
> > this pull request:
> > https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/345
> I have not read the discussion on github but an idea would be to have
> several levels of deprecation. Instead of "soft" and "hard" there could
> be numbers. Say level 1 could be used for scheduled for deprecation and
> depending what flags will be used when compiling it could print some
> kind of message. Level 2 would be soft deprecate and level 3 would be
> hard deprecate. There could also be more levels in between these levels
> if we want.
> 
> The idea is that the user can use a compiler flag to get messages about
> symbols that are scheduled for deprecation.
> 
> Don't know if this is too complicated.

And what would each level do? How would it interact with the compiler?

The feature needs to be simple. Deprecation is not something that is going to 
need to be used frequently, so making it particularly complicated is 
undesirable. It needs to be effective but easy to use. What we have is better 
than nothing, but it isn't quite good enough. So, it needs to be improved. But 
we don't need it to be vastly more powerful than it currently is, just iron it 
out a bit. Your suggestion sounds like it would be getting a bit complicated.

- Jonathan M Davis