if(arr) now a warning

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri May 1 02:07:57 PDT 2015


On Friday, May 01, 2015 08:51:10 Paolo Invernizzi via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 1 May 2015 at 08:40:25 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > I just do not understand why
> > some breaking changes are OK, and some other are not so ok.
> >
>
> +1.... but, again, I'm hopeless that W+A will understand the
> break-my-code spirit...

Walter tends to err on the side of wanting to break no code whatsoever, and
he almost never seems to understand when folks actually _want_ their code
broken, because they consider the current situation to be worse than having
their code temporarily broken (e.g. because leaving the current state of
things in place would result in far more bugs in the future). In light of
that, I'm actually kind of surprised that he's agreed to some of the code
breakage that we've done (e.g. making implicit falthrough in switch
statements illegal).

But to be fair, it's often hard to know when it's worth making a breaking
change even if you're willing to make them in order to catch and prevent
bugs or to clean-up a language featuer or whatever. And pretty much every
time you make such a change, some folks will be very happy about, whereas
others will be very _un_happy about it. So, to some extent, you just can't
win. And when that's the case, it's frequently easier to just leave things
as they are and avoid making breaking changes even if it might be better if
they were made.

- Jonathan M Davis



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