Format of .stringof, defined or not defined?

[Kapps]

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 07:06:27 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> I just hit a problem in my serialization library, Orange, being 
> integrated as std.serialization. The format of .stringof 
> changed in git HEAD. Now, the question is should the format of 
> .stringof be defined and reliable or not defined at all? Either 
> way, this should be clearly stated in the documentation, which 
> it's currently not.
>
> Below is what's changed. It's managed to stay unchanged for the 
> last 6-7 years.
>
> Before the change:
>
> struct Foo
> {
>     int a;
> }
>
> static assert(Foo.tupleof[0].stringof == "(Foo).a");
>
> After the change:
>
> static assert(Foo.tupleof[0].stringof == "a");

Aye, I had my own code break from this change as well (though it 
was a very easy fix in my case). I really prefer the new format 
however. Including the type made reading people's code very 
confusing with the random T.tupleof[T.stringof + 3 .. $] if you 
didn't understand the exact format. That being said, this is 
something that's commonly enough used that it should be defined 
whether or not the format could be relied upon.