poll about delete

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:18:43 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> It doesn't matter. delete nullifying its argument was a false sense of
> safety anyway - like the helmet of a kamikaze.

LOL. Ouch. That's a good one.

In any case, I would strongly argue that even if we were to keep delete, it 
should be kept as a function rather than a keyword on the basis that we don't 
want to promote attempts at manual memory management with garbage collected 
memory. And if we don't think that it's a good idea to do that at all (which I 
would tend to agree with), then delete should be removed entirely.

At this point, I get the impression that there is a subset of D users who want 
delete for whatever reason (be it misguided or legitimate), and they've been 
making noise about it, while many other D users don't care. I'm not sure that 
there are all that many people who are clamoring for its removal.

Still, it's arguably more consistent _not_ to have delete, and if both you and 
Walter feel that it shouldn't be around, then I say that we should remove it. 
You're the main guys deciding what form the language takes, and this is 
definitely one of those cases where you're not going to get a consensus, so just 
do what you think is best.

I would advise, however, that if we're going to deprecate features, they should 
still be removed sooner rather than later. Otherwise, not only will people 
continue to use them, but new D users will end up using them, which will make it 
harder to get rid of them cleanly. If many people are picking up TDPL, then 
we're going to be getting a definite increase in the number of people trying out 
D, and we don't want them to be using features that we intend to deprecate.

I would hope that it would be a priority to bring dmd totally in line with TDPL, 
and remove features from the language that aren't supposed to be there anymore. 
It creates a fair bit of confusion otherwise. At minimum, we should have a list 
of features which are still in dmd but which are (or should be) deprecated so 
that we know what not to use (along with actually deprecating everything that's 
supposed to be deprecated but not yet outright removed).

- Jonathan M Davis