string <-> null/bool implicit conversion

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 21 August 2015 at 09:14:16 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 August 2015 at 20:26:09 UTC, David Nadlinger 
> wrote:
>> It's even worse: http://dpaste.dzfl.pl/ba3376feca8e
>>
>> The arrays are equal, but their Boolean value is not.
>>
>> I don't get how Andrei can reconcile this with his "D avoids 
>> unforced errors" stance.
>
> The only technical excuse for the bug is code breakage, which 
> can be mostly addressed by dfix, but that's yet another 
> problem: tools like dfix are shunned for some reason.

I don't think that the use of dfix is shunned. Rather, dfix is 
shunned as a solution, because it requires that you run it. 
Walter gets unhappy about changing compiler flags even if the fix 
to existing code is trivial, because it requires that someone 
change their build scripts. The simply fact that code broke - 
regardless of how easy it is to fix - seems to be enough for 
Walter to think that it's a terrible idea. So, given Walter's 
attitude on that, I don't think that it really matters how good 
dfix is. Even if it were guaranteed to perfectly change all code 
that it was run on to fix whatever broke with a compiler or 
library change, the fact that you had to run it to fix the 
breakage was already too much.

I think that most of us would agree that if a change is desirable 
(assuming that code breakage is not taken into account) that if 
dfix is able to just fix whatever code breakage occurs, then the 
breakage isn't a big deal (at least as long as it's made clear to 
everyone getting the new release what the breakage is and that 
dfix will fix it for them). But Walter definitely does not seem 
to agree with that. Breakage is breakage no matter how easy it is 
to fix. Upon occasion, he will agree that something is worth 
breaking because of some huge benefit that we get from it, but 
that's pretty rare, and most of stuff that folks want to see 
broken to clean up the language definitely doesn't bring enough 
of a benefit for him to agree to it.

- Jonathan M Davis