Against deprecating aliases

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, September 29, 2011 00:47:46 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 9/28/11 12:56 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Wednesday, September 28, 2011 21:43:13 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> >> TLDR: Don't make Phobos upgrades annoying.
> > 
> > Having toUTF and toUTFz is a marked improvement in many cases -
> > especially for generic code. They're being added regardless of what the
> > deal with toUTF16z is.
> > 
> > The reason that toUTF16z is being removed is essentially because Andrei
> > is very much opposed to having functions with specific types in their
> > names and thinks that they should all be generic. Personally, I'm not
> > opposed to keeping toUTF16z as an alias or wrapper to toUTFz. It's
> > Andrei that seems to feel stongly about it. So, if enough people really
> > want to keep toUTF16z, then I think that that can happen.
> 
> There is such a notion as too much of a good thing. That applies to file
> size, rote repetition in unittests, naming conventions, and more.
> 
> Suggestions I give should not be construed as immutable law that must be
> obeyed without applying good judgment.

True. But when we discussed it, you favored getting rid of toUTF16z, and you 
seemed to be very much in favor of doing so. So, we ended up going with 
deprecation. If you want to change your mind and argue that toUTF16z should be 
kept, I'm fine with that. Personally, I'm divided on the matter. I wouldn't add 
toUTF16z if it didn't already exist, but since it already exists and toUTFz is 
a bit cumbersome in comparison, I think that there's a solid argument for 
keeping it.

But because I didn't feel particularly strongly either way, and you definitely 
seemed to be in favor of deprecation, we went with your decision on the matter 
before. We can certainly change that decision now. The function has been 
marked as scheduled for deprecated, but not actually deprecated yet - lot 
alone removed - so it's not exactly a hard to reinstate it.

- Jonathan M Davis