Should std.conv:parse parse html entities?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, November 13, 2019 5:17:17 AM MST berni44 via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> Concerning issue 9621 [1]: There are two things, that parse
> doesn't parse currently, namely octal numbers and html entities.
> While there is no argument against the former (I actually wrote a
> PR to add them), there has been some discussion around the later,
> because the whole table of those entities (about 3000) would make
> it in the code, even if not needed at all.
>
> As I don't think, I should try to decide this on my own, I'd like
> to know your oppinion: What is better: Add the entities or write
> in the docs, that they are not supported? What do you think?
>
> [1] https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9621

I fail to see why std.conv.to or std.conv.parse should handle either octal
literals or HTML entities, and I don't know why anyone would expect them to.
HTML entities are the kind of thing that I would expect an HTML parser to
handle, not the standard library. The compiler does handle some of them
(which honestly, I think is kind of weird), which is the only argument I can
see for supporting them in std.conv, but it's not like std.conv is designed
to be parsing D code. Also, IIRC, octal literals were removed from the
language. So, that's not an argument for adding them to std.conv. They also
not all that commonly needed by anything AFAIK. parse can already parse
integer values of arbitrary bases if you give it an explicit based / radix.

- Jonathan M Davis