eliminate junk from std.string?

[foobar]

Walter Bright Wrote:

> Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> > Agreed. So what's wrong with improving things and leaving old things as aliases?
> 
> Clutter.
> 
> One of the risks with Phobos development is it becoming a river miles wide, and 
> only an inch deep. In other words, endless gobs of shallow, trite functions, 
> with very little depth. (Aliases are as shallow as they get!)
> 
> As a general rule, I don't want functionality in Phobos that takes more time for 
> a user to find/read/understand the documentation on than to reimplement it 
> himself. Those things give the illusion of comprehensiveness, but are just 
> useless wankery.
> 
> Do we really want a 1000 page reference manual on Phobos, but no database 
> interface? No network interface? No D lexer? No disassembler? No superfast XML 
> parser? No best-of-breed regex implementation? No CGI support? No HTML parsing? 
> No sound support? No jpg reading?
> 
> I worry by endless bikeshedding about perfecting the spelling of some name, we 
> miss the whole show.
> 
> I'd like to see more meat. For example, Don has recently added gamma functions 
> to the math library. These are hard to implement correctly, and are perfect for 
> inclusion.


Trivial solution: 
have a separate set of modules that contain the backward compatible aliases. Have those modules documented *separately* in an appendix. 

No Clutter and no problems. 

Want to use familiar functions from e.g. C++? just use:
    iimport compatibility.cpp.string; 
instead of:
    import string;

Providing such packages would help programmers to transition from other languages to D and perhaps they should be optional addons to phoboes which are maintained separately.