Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

F i L witte2008 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 6 17:00:47 PST 2012


I personally find it much easier to remember and use longer, more 
sentance-like method names. However, Jonathan and others 
obviously feel more comfortable writing with a high level of 
abbreviation, which they justify rather well. Still, if D's goal 
is to gain popularity, I think it should take notices of other 
rising languages like C#.

The problem with making any change to Phobos is backwards 
compatibility. So, what if there was a way to satisfy both 
parties and keep backwards compatibility? Is there any compelling 
reason why simply wrapping Phobos into a different format would 
be such bad thing? Meaning:

     // system.io

     private import std.stdio;

     alias write   Write;
     alias writeln WriteLine;
     // etc...

Besides keeping things in-sync and error messages referring to 
the original function names (which could be amended), I don't see 
why such a library couldn't be written as a way to make the 
language easier to swallow to potential D users coming from 
Java/C#. Microsoft used similar tactics with J#/F# to help the 
Java/Python folks adapt their code to .NET.


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