remove keywords

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:fjb8c6$2nqs$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> The version statement is limited in that you cannot do !foo or 
> foo&&bar||baz. Rather than a bug, that is deliberate. I've seen a lot of 
> code that, over the years, accumulated detritus like:
>
>     #if FOO || BAR>0x1234 && BAZ && !HACK
>
> These tend to snarl themselves into such a rat's nest of conditionals the 
> only way to figure out which lines actually got compiled was to examine 
> the preprocessor output. (Another consequence of these is that, 
> inevitably, the various conditionals were WRONG as they were layered on by 
> people who didn't really understand the code.)
>
> So, by limiting the version statement, the idea is to encourage the 
> programmer to think in terms of distinct versions being generated, and 
> then code in terms of those distinct versions - each of those versions 
> having a name.

You tell me which is more readable:

version(linux || darwin || bsd)
    version = UseDlfcn;
else
    version = UseDLLs;

vs.

version(linux)
    version = UseDlfcn;
else version(darwin)
    version = UseDlfcn;
else version(bsd)
    version = UseDlfcn;
else
    version = UseDLLs;

It only gets worse when you actually *need* complex versioning, and when the 
contents of those version blocks become more than trivial.  Yes, you can 
define intermediate versions like I've done here, but even that becomes 
tedious and hard to read.