deprecate deprecated?

[Walter Bright]

On 11/6/2012 5:12 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> And how would this interact with -d? It's one thing to give symbols attributes
> which can be examined at compile time. It's quite another to make it so that
> they don't compile without a specific compiler flag.

The -version flag can be used to turn things on and off in user code.


> I also don't really get what we gain from this. The only thing that I'm aware
> of which is really up for debate at this point is whether deprecated should
> result in an error or a warning. We even have messages for it now.

The gain is in reducing the demand for constant language changes. It's similar 
to the ability to now do GC introspection entirely in the library, rather than 
changing the compiler.


> Adding custom attributes which somehow indicate "scheduled for deprecation" or
> something like that might make sense, but what is beneficial abou removing
> deprecated itself from the language? How could that even work given that
> deprecated does more than simply tag the symbol with information?

I didn't say remove it. I said deprecate it.