Should we deprecate comma?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/23/14, 5:41 PM, Meta wrote:
> On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 20:56:45 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Discuss: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/3399
>>
>> Andrei
>
> You mentioned on the Github PR that this broke some Phobos (and
> Druntime?) code. What was the extent of the breakage? If it's small, I'd
> say give it a year-long deprecation period and then be done with it
> forever.

The extent of the breakage is NOT among the top factors. Once a piece of 
code goes from "compiles" to "doesn't compile" that lowers the 
acceptance level by an order of magnitude. Only after that, the extent 
of the breakage has any import.

Top factors:

0. Any silent breakages or changes in semantics? 100000000x

1. How frequent is the breakage? Is most code going to still work? 100x

2. How much does fixing the breakage improve code? Was the breaking code 
incorrect for the most part? 100x


Andrei