deprecate deprecated?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 11-11-2012 14:18, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 07:03:55 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 6 November 2012 at 23:56:13 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I know there's been some long term unhappiness about the deprecated
>>> attribute - it's all-or-nothing approach, poor messages, etc. Each
>>> change in it changes the language and the compiler.
>>
>> I *just* had a conversation about this, but there *needs* to be a way
>> to to tell the compiler: "don't use deprecated stuff": If it merely
>> issues a warning, then you'll end up calling deprecated code, because
>> traits will answer positively to something that is actually deprecated:
>>
>> For example if a range has "deprecated opIndex", and you try a search
>> on that range, the implementation will take the RA road...
>>
>> I had proposed a "three state -d":
>> -- : Deprecated stuff just can't be used
>> -d : You can use deprecated stuff, but you get no warning
>> -dw : You can use deprecated stuff, and are served with a warning
>
> BTW, I already implemented that and is available as a pull request (I
> just called the option -di to follow the naming of -wi).
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1185
>
> This pull request is available since July 2011 (was pull #248 back
> then), and I'm trying to convince Walter to merge it since then without
> any success. I'm really glad this finally came up here, maybe he finally
> understand the importance of having an usable deprecated implementation :)
>
> BTW, I think the default should be to have deprecations as warnings and
> not the other way around, but since I at least have the option to make
> them warnings, I'm fine.

Yes, definitely warnings by default. The current system makes the 
deprecated keyword useless in practice for libraries because it can 
break arbitrary build systems out there.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org