assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 21:51:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 09:42:06PM +0000, Jonathan M Davis via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 14:10:14 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> [...]
>> But we probably would be better off if none of the switches 
>> had names
>> like -release or -debug so that folks actually had to figure 
>> out what
>> they did before using them rather than simply assuming that 
>> one is for
>> release builds and the other is for debug builds.
> [...]
>
> Great. So let's rename all of dmd's command-line options to -a, 
> -b, -c,
> -d, -e, -f, ... (in arbitrary order). As long as we document it 
> all, it
> will work just perfectly fine, right? After all, it *does* 
> force users
> to *really* know what each option does. :-D

LOL. That would be stupid. No, what would make sense would be 
something like --remove-assertions.

But regardless, I'm not advocating that we change the switches. I 
don't think that it's a big enough problem to merit that. But I 
do think that we could have picked better names.

The one that always stumps me though is -debug. It's a bad name, 
because it makes people think debug/release, when all it does is 
enable debug blocks, and it can actually be used in release 
builds, but given that they're debug blocks, -debug makes sense. 
And I can't think of a better name for it. But even if I could 
think of a better name, I think that we're stuck with -debug at 
this point.

- Jonathan M Davis