Why is Phobos `Flag` so overthought ?

[Nick Treleaven]

On Thursday, 9 May 2024 at 13:40:56 UTC, cc wrote:
> It's pointless mandatory verbosity.  StopWatch ctor only takes 
> one boolean argument.  It doesn't *need* to specify what it 
> relates to.  You either already know, or you have to look it up 
> anyway.  Flags made sense when you might get the order of 
> multiple bools confused, but if there's only one, *or* if you 
> can use named arguments to avoid ambiguity,

So you have justified Flag.

> there's no point in demanding every parameter be a unique type. 
>  It's easy to remember I can pass a bool to a StopWatch to 
> autostart it.

But perhaps true means manual start? Remembering can also be used 
to justify dynamic typing outside of hot loops, I'd rather not 
rely on remembering with a big team of programmers working on a 
project.

> It's less easy to remember that a specific unique type needs to 
> be used, and remembering whether the name/casing of that type 
> was Start, StartNow, StartAuto, Autostart, AutoStart, 
> autostart, autoStart, etc.

So just pass it true, and run the compiler. The compiler will 
tell you what the correct type is.

>  We have a tool in our box already called `true` and that 
> solves the problem.  If we had to type out the full name of 
> every argument passed to every function ever written we may as 
> well just adopt ObjC Cocoa style and call it 
> StopWatchWithAutoStartBool().

Strawman.