The worst Phobos template (in binderoo)

[Eugene Wissner via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 29 September 2016 at 16:02:53 UTC, David Nadlinger 
wrote:
>
> This wouldn't be a correct use of the feature anyway, since it 
> runs into all sorts of fundamental issues with imports/scoping, 
> aliases and templates. Using .stringof/fullyQualifiedName to 
> generate a reference to a type or symbol in a string mixin is a 
> mistake, period. Unfortunately, the misconception that they 
> *are* code generation tools is fairly wide-spread, to the point 
> where dlang.org contains a similarly misleading comment. [1]
>
> Just emit the typeof expression into the mixin string, e.g. 
> `mixin("typeof(a) c;");`. It should be fairly easy to convince 
> yourself that a similar rewrite is always possible, even if it 
> is sometimes less obvious (in some situations, you might need 
> to change some code to, say, pass on a template parameter `T` 
> all the way to the point of the mixin() call instead of 
> `T.stringof`).
>
>  — David
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/380


Maybe it is correct about the usage of 
.stringof/fullyQualifiedName. But I still don't understand the 
argumentation. Why it is so bad if something works as expected, 
why it is so evil if fullyQualifiedName would return what is 
says: the fully qualified name.

The problem is you can never know all the use cases of some 
feature. It is just pointless to try to predict where a user will 
need a feature. I had a use case where I could be sure that 
everything needed is imported and where I could save compile time 
and make the function signatures a bit simpler.

Let us just remove fullyQualifiedName from the language. Why 
spend effort with it? Why should one write into the 
documentation: Oh, you thought it would work? How funny! This 
function is just for fun of the library creators and is only good 
to pass it to writeln(), it isn't supposed to work.