deprecate deprecated?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 11-11-2012 14:09, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 November 2012 at 08:13:37 UTC, Don Clugston wrote:
>> On 07/11/12 00:56, 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.
>>>
>>> Perhaps it could be done with a user defined attribute instead?
>>>
>>> Anyone want to take on the challenge?
>>
>> That *cannot* fix the problem.
>> The problem is not with the deprecated attribute at all, it's with the
>> command line switches.
>
> Exactly, deprecated is one of those features that *needs* to be
> in the compiler, at least part of it. Because is not only about
> the deprecated attribute for user symbols, there are also
> deprecated constructs in the language, that only the compiler can
> detect and can emit messages for.
>
> Having deprecated as a core part of the language is not an
> option, is the only way to do it right, so why don't we just fix
> it in the compiler then? Adding the deprecated("message") syntax
> was a huge step forward. Now we just need an option to emit
> deprecations as warnings and that's it. It's already there, you
> just have to merge it :)
>
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1185

I'm against that pull request. Not because I think it isn't useful, but 
because I think it doesn't fix the problem.

Usage of deprecated symbol(s) should be a warning by default and the new 
option should be used to turn that into an error; not the other way around.

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