DIP 1007 Preliminary Review Round 1

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 04:58:12PM +0100, rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 24/04/2017 4:03 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
> > DIP 1007 is titled "'future symbol' Compiler Concept".
> > 
> > https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1007.md
[...]
> This DIP concerns me, for any other language I would go so far as to
> saying, I would expect people to overuse this to the extreme. Going by
> what they "think" they may need in the future instead of what they
> definitely will need.

Initially I also had the same concern, but after reading the DIP in its
entirety, I think it may be worth considering. The DIP, as it stands,
proposes to make this feature available *only to the compiler* as a
hard-coded list of symbols, meaning that in its first incarnation it
will only be used for adding new symbols to e.g., druntime.

*If* it passes this first round of implementation / general usage in the
D community, then a followup DIP can be made to make this feature
available to the general user.  But if any major issues arise in this
first stage, we can simply forego further implementation, perhaps even
revert the feature.

I think this is a perfectly acceptable implementation plan. IMO it's
worth a try.

(And I would make it a point that IMO the first implementation of this
DIP should NOT make this feature generally available to the user; that
should be done only as a followup DIP.)


> On the flip side, it would be great for development, feature not yet
> done but planned? Annotate it. Even before a release ever happens.
[...]

This is good and bad.  If overused, it could lead to the situation you
described, where people aggressively "reserve" future symbols that
eventually turn out to be unnecessary, thus potentially "wasting" good
names in the namespace.


T

-- 
WINDOWS = Will Install Needless Data On Whole System -- CompuMan