Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Brad Anderson]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>wrote:

> On Friday, March 09, 2012 17:41:01 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> > I'll say I *don't* agree with the rejection of aliases on principle --
> > aliases can be extremely useful/helpful, and they cost literally nothing
> > (the "cognitive cost" on the docs is a BS argument IMO). I just don't
> > agree with consuming so many common symbols for the sake of sugar.
>
> aliases need to have a really good argument for existing. If UFCS is fully
> implemented, then I think that there is _some_ argument for having stuff
> like
> hours and minutes, because then you can do stuff like 5.seconds() (though
> honestly, I really don't like the idea). The alias enables different usages
> rather than simply being another name for the same thing.
>
> Now, in this particular case, it's that much worse for exactly the reason
> that
> you're against it: it uses common names for free functions. It's not as
> big a
> problem as it would be in C or C++, but it's still a problem. There's also
> some risk that it will break code.
>
>
Oh, and I'd just like to add some of my experience to this. These names are
used by Boost's datetime library and they've never been a problem for me
and at work we make extensive use of Boost datetime.  There is risk but I
think in this specific case they are fairly small (especially in D, over
C++).  We switched to Boost datetime after we had hundreds of thousands of
lines of code written using a different system and I didn't encounter any
problems with the duration shortcut functions clashing.

Anyway, it sounds like Walter is probably opposed from what he was saying
in the other thread so this conversation is probably moot.

Regards,
Brad Anderson

- Jonathan M Davis
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20120309/20b53c85/attachment.html>