Are there any default dmd optimizations

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 27 February 2013 at 01:03:44 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> It's not actually a feature of ddoc at all. Ddoc just transmits 
> its input to its output, expanding macros along the way.

The problem with that is it makes it extremely inconvenient to 
document a html library, and *impossible* to output correct data 
in formats unknown to the original author. You say outputting to 
different formats is a selling point, but that just isn't true.

Consider this simple comment:

/// Given "<b>text</b>", returns "text"

The most correct output for html is:

Given "<b&rt;text</b&rt;", returns 
"text"


Now, suppose we want our ddoc to output... say, json, just to 
pull an easy to show example. It *should* be:

"Given \"<b>text<\/b>\", returns \"text\""

In json, the quotes need to be escaped and it is common to also 
escape the forward slash, so that's what we want. In html, we 
encode quotes differently and should also encode < and >.


But, there's no way to actually do that with ddoc's macros. If we 
wanted our ddoc to output json, we'd have to write:

Given $(QUOTE)<b>text<$(SLASH)b>

well you get the idea. And now if we want it to work for both 
html AND json, we're writing:

$(QUOTE)$(LT)b$(GT)text$(LT)$(SLASH)b$(GR)


And obviously, that's absurd. What was a readable comment (which 
ddoc is supposed to aspire to) is now a hideous mess of macros.



So, you say "nobody would output ddoc to json", but this is just 
one easy example with different encoding rules than html. LaTeX 
I'm pretty sure needs you to escape the backslash. I'm not sure, 
I've barely used latex, so I wouldn't use those macros in my own 
code.

What if somebody else wants to apply his set of latex macros to 
my code file expecting it to just work? It probably won't.



And, again, this is very easy to solve in the vast majority of 
cases: put that ESCAPES macro to good use by running it over the 
input data ASAP. Then the data will be properly encoded for 
whatever formats we need, without needing these bad preemptive 
macros.