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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/3/19 5:11 PM, Dennis wrote:
> What criteria should a language feature have to be candidate for 
> removal, and why don't context-sensitive string literals fit those 
> criteria? What sources of language complexity can be removed instead?

That got me thinking. Here's what I'd opine.

A good DIP creates a scientific argument. It would have the general 
attitude of building, through a series of factual statements, a 
hypothesis that is convincing. A neutral person with the proper 
background would read the facts and reach the conclusion as much as the 
author. (In contrast, a DIP that is not scientific would attempt to use 
qualitative arguments and rhetoric in an attempt to create an opinion 
trend.)

Consider someone reads a DIP proposing the removal of here docs 
containing facts such as these:

* "We have analyzed x languages and of these, we found y historical 
issues related to mistaken or poor performance implementation of 
heredocs. [... details ...]"

* "Across x editors, we discovered that x1 do not implement here docs 
for any of their supported languages, x2 do not implement them for D, 
and x3 implement them with severe performance bottlenecks. [... details 
...]"

" "In the D compiler issue, we found x bug reports issued over y years. 
They took z days on average to fix. x1 issues are still open. [... 
details ...]"

* "The code dedicated to heredocs in the D reference parser is y lines 
long, which constitutes z% of the entire lexer. Lexing of heredocs is t% 
slower than any other equivalent strings, revealing a serious 
performance bottleneck. [... details ...]"

With such arguments at hand, a proposal would build a powerful argument 
that anyone can easily verify and take into consideration. No need for 
argumentation, explanations, etc. Conversely, if one does such an 
investigation and gets no meaningful results, the conclusion that 
heredocs are okay as they are would also be immediate.

Now it may be argued that all of this is hard work, and of high risk - 
even if the DIP is well-argued, it could be rejected. Also, is the 
result of the work (a small language simplification) worth the effort?

Sadly I know of no solution to this. What I can say is that it's the 
main dilemma tormenting graduate students doing research. A colleague of 
mine in the PhD program said he has any number of ideas to research, but 
the cognitive load of putting work into something that may not pan out 
is paralyzing him, so he ends up doing nothing for long periods of time. 
He ended up not finishing his degree. For all I know he was smarter and 
better than many who did graduate.