Proposal on improvement to deprecated

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, October 02, 2011 20:36:58 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 10/2/2011 6:48 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Regardless of all that though, I think that the issues that we've found
> > in using deprecated need to be addressed - preferably with a simple
> > solution, but they need to be addressed just the same.
> 
> A message is probably justified. The rest, I have serious reservations
> about.

Well, making deprecation print messages but not prevent code compilation and 
then later completely preventing code compilation when you make it "full" 
would better deal with the use case that you're always having problems with of 
code being broken as soon as something is deprecated. It'll make it so that 
programmers get a message (which they may be able to turn off with -d) rather 
than their code breaking, and then when the item would have been removed, 
rather than their code just breaking, it breaks (since the item has been fully 
deprecated and is unusable), but they get a decent message about how to fix it. 
The end result is much less disruptive and not much more complicated than what 
we have now.

- Jonathan M Davis