D versionning

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, July 15, 2012 23:05:39 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/15/2012 4:34 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> >> It needs to stop completely.
> > 
> > Most of the renaming of functions which has gone on has been because
> > Phobos
> > has been inconsistent with its naming, which makes it harder to use and
> > learn. As that's sorted out (as has mostly been done), those changes will
> > stop. But do you honestly expect that everything in the standard library
> > is going to be frozen at some point? Is that what you're suggesting?
> 
> I've had a lot of my own working D code break because of name changes in
> Phobos. This is extremely annoying. I can fully understand that it drives
> people away. It's got to stop.
> 
> We could bikeshed forever about what exact spelling and casing a name should
> have. That's fine for new names. Old names should stay.
> 
> Breaking things should have a very high bar. Merely a name change is not
> good enough.

Which is precisely why I was trying to get all of the name changes out of the 
way early and quickly so that we'd get the names fixed and then not having any 
more of that kind of breakage. At this point, in almost all cases (maybe even 
in all cases), when a name gets changed, it's because the function is being 
replaced by a better function. And even that kind of change is happening less 
and should eventually become quite rare. While there are a number of symbols 
currently going through the deprecation process in Phobos, not much is being 
scheduled for deprecation anymore, and most of the stuff on the deprecation 
path has already been deprecated and is approaching the point when it will be 
removed.

I understand your annoyance with the name changes, but when it was discussed, 
almost everyone in the newsgroup thought that it was worth it to make those 
changes in order to make the library more consistent. Having done that, we are 
now far more stringent about changing names.

- Jonathan M Davis