Why not flag away the mistakes of the past?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 3/7/18 1:00 AM, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
> So i've seen on the forum over the years arguments about auto-decoding 
> (mostly) and some other things. Things that have been considered 
> mistakes, and cannot be corrected because of the breaking changes it 
> would create. And I always wonder why not make a solution to the tune of 
> a flag that makes things work as they used too, and make the new 
> behavior default.
> 
> dmd --UseAutoDecoding
> 
> That way the breaking change was easily fixable, and the mistakes of the 
> past not forever. Is it just the cost of maintenance?

Note, autodecoding is NOT a feature of the language, but rather a 
feature of Phobos.

It would be quite interesting I think to create a modified phobos where 
autodecoding was optional and see what happens (could be switched with a 
-version=autodecoding). It wouldn't take much effort -- just take out 
the specializations for strings in std.array.

-Steve