Against deprecating aliases

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

Why wont to!string(), to!wstring() and to!dstring() to the trick?
This is essentially toUTF8, toUTF16 and toUTF32.
And the toStringz can be templated to take any of string, wstring and dstring.
I don't see any problem here.
Just drop the whole thing.

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 29, 2011 09:20:39 Christophe wrote:
>> Jonathan M Davis , dans le message (digitalmars.D:145653), a écrit :
>> > 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.
>>
>> Sure, toWcharz would be a really bad name, but UTF16 is not a specific
>> type, it is a specific encoding.
>
> UTF-16 and wchar are synonymous. wchar is UTF-16 by definition. If you have
> toUTF8, toUTF16, and toUTF32, then it's a pain for generic code, because yo
> uhave to do a bunch of static ifs on the type that you're converting to and
> call the appropriate function, in spite of the fact that the type that you're
> converting to gives you exactly what the conversion should be. So, putting
> UTF16 in the name is tantemount to putting wchar it the name, it just makes
> way more sense to have toUTF and toUTFz. The issue here is that using toUTFz
> is more cumbersome, because it's more verbose, and there is one very common
> use case which toUTF16z fulfills. So there is a usability argument in favor of
> toUTF16z. In general however, putting UTF8, UTF16, or UTF32 in a function name
> is bad design, since it's essentially identical to putting char, wchar, and
> dchar in the function names, which just is not generic at all.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>