No need for version expression is a lie

[Paul Backus]

On Tuesday, 22 August 2023 at 01:46:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Thanks for your thoughts on this. One more meta thing about 
> versioning is it is better to remove all the version 
> conditionals from the core parts of the program.
>
> I.e. abstract away what the versioning is trying to represent, 
> and put those abstractions in a separate module.
>
> Over time I've gotten better at this, and it makes the code 
> much more pleasing to read.
>
> I'll be talking about this and similar things at DConf.

There's a 1992 article on writing portable C programs that comes 
to similar conclusions:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sa92/spencer.pdf