Proposal on improvement to deprecated

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-10-02 22:16, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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

I was thinking that the levels match to different types of compiler 
messages. Above one level you get a note, above the next level a warning 
and above yet another level you get an error. Then it's up to the users 
to decide what a given level means.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg