Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, March 09, 2012 16:16:56 Brad Anderson wrote:
> 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.

I'd say that there's a higher chance of the aliases being added than of dur 
being changed to duration. Changing dur will _definitely_ break code and make 
using it worse for exactly the same reason that it's dur in the first place - 
it's too long when combined with the required units string. The aliases might 
break code, but it's probably only in cases where someone already has free 
functions with those names, and it's more likely that they'll have variables 
with those names, which are less likely to conflict.

So, while I don't really like the idea of adding the aliases, they _might_ be 
added, because they probably won't break anything, and they enable UFCS. But 
there's not a good enough reason to change dur to duration at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis