[Issue 12837] New: Deprecate individual unit getters on Duration and rename its get to getOnly

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12837

          Issue ID: 12837
           Summary: Deprecate individual unit getters on Duration and
                    rename its get to getOnly
           Product: D
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P1
         Component: druntime
          Assignee: nobody at puremagic.com
          Reporter: jmdavisProg at gmx.com

Okay. Duration currently has

    long total(string units)() @safe const pure nothrow {}

and

    long get(string units)() @safe const pure nothrow {}

It then has a series of wrappers around get for get!"weeks"(), get!"hours"(),
etc, which bear the unit names - weeks, hours, etc.

I have a similar type in C++ at work, which does not have the wrappers, and
what I have found is that people consistently misuse get, thinking that it's
total, and it keeps causing bugs. I don't know that that's happening with get
much with core.time.Duration, because we have the individual unit wrappers, but
I fully expect that folks are misusing those the some way. That being the case,
I think that we need to change these functions on Duration to make this clearer
and prevent such bugs, which are often hard to track down.

So, I propose that we add getOnly (which is the same as get) and deprecate get
(which probably won't cause many folks to change their code, since almost
everyone will probably be using the wrappers) as well as deprecate all of the
individual unit wrapper functions. This _does_ make code that uses them longer
- e.g. d.getOnly!"hours"() instead of d.hours - but odds are that in most cases
where they're used, it's a bug anyway, and they should have been using total.

So, this will cause some folks to change their code, but in a lot of those
cases, it will probably catch bugs for them.

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