Import concerns revisited

[John Reimer]

An excellent post.  I feel much the same as Sean about the reason it is so
difficult to "convince" in relation to the import syntax issue.  It is about
aesthetics to a great extent.  But I think the aesthetics are very important in
this situation because it decides how D appears to those trying to understand
the language.

I aslo share Seans feelings concerning the alias attribute.  "alias" is a great
addition to the D langauge.  Perhaps I was unclear in my last response to
Walter: alias, in itself, is not a hack in the general case.  But I believe it
is laborious and ugly when used in the context of modules and imports.

D should be elegant.  Using alias and static import comes across as a verbose
workaround when one is working with multiple module imports; in all other cases,
it may be equivalent, but I think it's just plain ugly in comparison to the
alternative syntax using with/as or from/as.  It accomplishes something that
could be greatly simplified with an addition of a minor syntax expansion.

-JJR

In article <e8rk68$1fat$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Sean Kelly says...
>
>Walter Bright wrote:
>> kris wrote:
>>> The use of alias, regarding imports, should very likely be kept to a 
>>> bare minimum in anything other than Q&D development. Ideally zero.
>> 
>> I really don't understand your pov. I can't help but think you regard 
>> alias as like C++'s #define:
>> 
>>     alias foo bar;
>>     #define bar foo
>> 
>> Such #define's I would agree are a terrible hack that don't belong in 
>> professional code. But aliasing isn't like that, it's a sane and 
>> well-behaved replacement.
>
>I think Kris was merely suggesting that the need for a separate alias 
>declaration for each import was the problem, not the idea of aliasing 
>itself.  If a particular module imports 10 others, that's 10 separate 
>aliases required as well, and there's no good way to write them in a way 
>that makes for easy readability and maintenance.  This is the point he 
>was trying to make below.
>

<snip great post content>