Final by default?

[Joakim]

On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 20:45:35 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 14.03.2014 19:50, schrieb H. S. Teoh:
>> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 07:29:27PM +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> Am 14.03.2014 19:06, schrieb Iain Buclaw:
>>>> On 14 March 2014 17:53, Walter Bright 
>>>> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>>>> On 3/14/2014 10:26 AM, Johannes Pfau wrote:
--snip---
>> +1. Once versioned code gets more than 2 levels deep, it 
>> becomes an
>> unreadable mess. The .di approach is much more manageable.
>>
>>
>>> Back on my C/C++ days at work, any conditional code would be 
>>> killed
>>> by me during code reviews.
>> [...]
>>
>> Ah, how I wish I could do that... over here at my job, parts 
>> of the code
>> are a nasty rats'-nest of #if's, #ifdef's, #ifndef's, and 
>> "functions"
>> that aren't defined anywhere (they are generated by macros, 
>> including
>> their names!). It used to be relatively sane while the project 
>> still
>> remained a single project... Unfortunately, about a year or so 
>> ago, the
>> PTBs decided to merge another project into this one, and by 
>> "merge" they
>> meant, graft the source tree of the other project into this 
>> one, hack it
>> with a hacksaw until it compiles, then call it a day. We've 
>> been
>> suffering from the resulting schizophrenic code ever since, 
>> where some
>> files are compiled when configuring for platform A, and 
>> skipped over and
>> some other files are compiled when configuring for platform B 
>> (often
>> containing conflicting functions of the same name but with 
>> incompatible
>> parameters), and a ton of #if's and #ifdef's nested to the 
>> n'th level
>> got sprinkled everywhere in the common code in order to glue 
>> the
>> schizophrenic mess into one piece. One time, I spent almost an 
>> hour
>> debugging some code that turned out to be inside an #if 0 ... 
>> #endif
>> block. >:-(  (The real code had been moved elsewhere, you see, 
>> and
>> whoever moved the code "kindly" decided to leave the old copy 
>> in the
>> original file inside an #if 0 block, "for reference", whatever 
>> that
>> means. Then silly old me came along expecting the code to 
>> still be in
>> the old place, and sure enough it was -- except that 
>> unbeknownst to me
>> it's now inside an #if 0 block. Gah!)
>>
>>
>> T
>>
>
>
> Ouch! I feel your pain.
>
> This type of experience is what lead me to fight #ifdef 
> spaghetti code.
>
> --
> Paulo

Yeah, having had to deal with macro spaghetti when porting code 
to new platforms, I completely agree with Walter on this one.  
Whatever small inconveniences are caused by not allowing any 
logic inside or with version checks is made up for many times 
over in clarity and maintenance down the line.