obsolete D libraries/modules

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, August 31, 2013 19:18:11 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I remember sitting next to Kirk McDonald at the D conference in 2007 as
> he was showing me Python's argparse. I personally found pretty much any
> example we could think of more verbose and uglier than std.getopt.

std.getopt is definitely lacking some nice-to-have features (like automatically 
generating --help from the options), but for the most part, I don't think that 
it can be improved much without seriously complicating it. I think that it's 
about at the limit of what can be done and still have it be simple, and it 
works really well for the most part, so if we haven't hit the sweet spot, 
we're at least close. I've toyed with trying to figure out how to improve it, 
but I think that doing so cleanly would be very hard.

The main thing that I'd really like to see changed is the exception types that 
it throws, because I'd very much like to be able to have code which can give 
specific information about how the flags were incorrectly used and whatnot, and 
ConvException (which is usually what you get) doesn't cut it for that. You'd 
need getopt-specific exceptions for that. But we can fix that without changing 
the API. It's just that doing so would likely break code which was catching 
ConvException explicitly, so if we do that, we might be forced to introduce 
getOpt to replace getopt or something like that. But even if we did that, the 
basic design wouldn't change, just what it's throwing on failure.

- Jonathan M Davis