Proposed Enhancement: Deprecate std.conv.text With 0 Arguments

[Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d]

On 6/23/16 7:46 PM, deadalnix wrote:
> On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 23:16:23 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> This is a problem with optional (), not text.
>>
>> A valid point. But we aren't going to have this change.
>>
>
> Spreading the shit doesn't make it smell good.

I once cared a lot about making parentheses required for non- at property 
functions that take no args. I'm not so keen on it any more, it doesn't 
add a lot of clarity in cases of no-arg functions.

The one thing that can be said here is that text is a terrible name for 
a function, since it's a likely name for a variable as well. asText or 
toText would have been better.

>> It's not a special case to require a minimum number of parameters.
>>
>
> You are just pushing the problem up one level. Now every template that
> call text with a sequence need to do a length check (and none will).

And likely if they do happen to send zero args to text, it was a bug in 
the first place (and they should have been checking the length).

Also, you don't have to do much to work around:

foo(T...)(T args) {
text("", args);
}

> The very problem is that the optional () make the argumentless thing a
> special case. Special cases are like cancer, they spread. Making more
> argumentless thing special cases is just making the problem worse.

The cases where you are going to call text with an unknown quantity of 
parameters is pretty small. I think they can deal with it. The fact that 
meta's PR caused zero breakage should tell you something.

-Steve