if(arr) now a warning

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 1 May 2015 at 12:03, Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw at gdcproject.org> wrote:
> On 1 May 2015 at 11:28, Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On Friday, 1 May 2015 at 09:08:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>>
>>> 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).
>>
>>
>> It's not really as simple as that, and I think I understand W & A's position
>> here.
>>
>> It seems that every once in a while, someone on Reddit etc. is going to say
>> something along the lines of "I once tried to compile some code written in
>> D, and it didn't compile with none of the three compilers. I'm not familiar
>> with the language or code, so fixing it was out of the question, and so was
>> randomly trying old compiler versions. If other people are going to have the
>> same experience using MY code, then I don't see the point in investing time
>> in D."
>>
>> I was in the "break my code" camp for a long time, but this has gradually
>> changed as the amount of D code I've written grew. Let me tell you, it's
>> totally not fun when you need to quickly fix a D program you wrote 3 years
>> ago because something is on fire and it needs fixing now, and discover you
>> have to make a bunch of changes just to get it to compile again. The
>> alternative is using an older compiler, and DVM helps with that - but this
>> doesn't work if the fix is in a library which is not compatible with older
>> compiler versions.
>>
>> I would love a cleaner D language, if only it could be enforced just onto
>> NEW code.
>
> pragma(old_code);


Actually, one could even take inspiration from Perl's 'use VERSION' as
a way tell the compiler to use the semantics/warnings of a previous
release.  But then it comes down to a feeling of some competing
element between cleaner D language vs. cleaner D implementation.

Iain.