DIP 1026---Deprecate Context-Sensitive String Literals---Community Review Round 1

[Elronnd]

On Tuesday, 3 December 2019 at 20:53:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> *snipped various arguments to do with simplicity*
> Agreed, but that can't be the only criterion for removing a 
> feature. By the same argument, one could make the case for 
> removing templates from D. Bingo, the language instantly 
> becomes so much easier to parse! And it greatly simplifies the 
> compiler -- we can delete large sections of it, in fact! The 
> spec becomes simpler, D newbies don't need to learn this hard 
> template stuff anymore, and we can close all template-relateed 
> bugs, and tools become greatly simplified.

That's clearly not a fair comparison.  Heredocs can be reduced to 
a set of local transformations, while templates cannot.  This 
means: code using heredocs can be mechanically changed to not use 
them, and heredocs do not make the language more expressive.

>> If we don't want D support in syntax highlighters to be 
>> half-baked everywhere, keeping the lexical grammar simple is a 
>> good cause.
> IOW, implementators aren't competent enough to implement 
> something up to spec, therefore we should dumb down the spec 
> for their sake? Sounds like a backwards reason for doing 
> something.

The easier the language is to implement, the more implementors 
there will be.  If there are compelling reasons to include a 
language feature, and it makes implementation more difficult, it 
should be included regardless.  But that doesn't mean that ease 
of implementation should be completely ignored when considering 
language features.