new DIP47: Outlining member functions of aggregates

[Peter Williams]

On 08/09/13 22:46, Gary Willoughby wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 September 2013 at 17:00:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Outlining of member functions is the practice of placing the
>> declaration of a member function in the struct/class/union, and
>> placing the definition of it at global scope in the module or even in
>> another module.
>>
>> http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP47
>
> I'm absolutely against this DIP.
>
> This proposal is just going back to the hell of header files again. Why
> on earth would you emulate C/C++ when D was supposed to be designed
> taking into account lessons learned from them. This is unnecessary
> complexity added for the sake of a few programmers who can't get out of
> C++ mode. I think you need to have a good hard think about *why* header
> files were introduced into those early languages and then consider if
> that reason is still valid. Personally i don't think it is. Java and C#
> do just fine without this.
>
> Seriously, this goes against everything you learn as a programmer,
> nothing should ever be typed twice and then to say that the declaration
> and implementation could be different just boggles my mind?!?! Great
> more work!
>
> If implemented, i will never used this feature and i will never deal
> with code that uses it either. I choose D *purely* because it didn't
> have this header file nonsense. If i find in future i start seeing more
> and more of this style of D code i would just move on to use something
> else that doesn't have all this extra baggage and work associated with
> it. Just because Manu brings it up randomly you decide to create a DIP?
>
> In reality this is a documentation issue. Which has already been
> addressed by DDOC or *.di files. If data exists in one form, and it is
> needed in another, that's work a computer should do. Not a human! IDE's
> also give you numerous tools to get class overviews and such. If you are
> suggesting that you also need these class overviews in code to be viewed
> on github etc, just use comments. They are as arbitrary and simpler to
> implement.
>
> Honestly this DIP is going backwards, i was under the impression D was
> going forwards! I am so disappointed.

Well said.

Peter