stability

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> "Derek Parnell" <derek at psych.ward> wrote in message
> news:fg6iag085q4z.1pwf80bx3vys3.dlg at 40tude.net...
>>
>> A bug is where the current behaviour is contrary to the specification.
>> An enhancement is proposed behaviour that is not documented in the
>> specification.
>>
>> The problem we (including Walter) have is that D does not have a
>> specification and therefore there is no method to determine if a given
>> behaviour is by design or a mistake. All we have is "common sense",
>> "that's
>> how C++/Java/C#/XXX does it", "it feels right", etc ...
>
> Exactly.  The "struct tupleof not able to access private members" that was
> fixed in the most recent D2 update is a perfect example of this.  tupleof is
> very ill-defined in the spec, so it's not entirely clear _what_ it should
> do, so it seems kind of arbitrary to classify that ability as an enhancement
> rather than a bug.

Funny that you mentioned it. I just tested that .tupleof apparently 
doesn't even return any valid type / value :S. See 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1866#c1. Of course 
specifying these and changing the old behavior breaks old code, but 
seriously any code that relies on unspecified features and buggy 
implementations will be horribly broken anyways some day. Walter 
should worry about what kind of effect these kind of weirdnesses have on
the health of us poor little developers.