Editions Ideas

[Nick Treleaven]

On Saturday, 13 December 2025 at 21:25:29 UTC, Sadiel wrote:
> This is a list of things that the D team have wanted to remove 
> over the years:
>
> - Complex number support

As it's already deprecated, should be OK to error on this in an 
edition.

> - Lazy attribute



> - Some problematic features of classes,

Do you mean something like ProtoObject?

> __traits(compiles, ...)

Can you expand on that?

> - alias this

For classes, maybe it would be sufficient to:
1. Forbid alias this from producing anything that implicitly 
converts to Object.
2. Forbid alias this if a superclass has already defined it.

For structs, I think there was some plan to replace it, but I 
never saw details.

> - Extern C++ with an identifier for the namespace
>
> Now, what I would like is to simplify the syntax:
> There are like 5 ways of creating delegates, wouldn't be better 
> to stick to one?

It might be justified to remove BlockStatement from 
[FunctionLiteral](https://dlang.org/spec/expression.html#function_literals), to make parsing easier. Use `() { ... }` instead.

> Make different keywords instead of overusing them, for example 
> static.

I think that would need to demonstrate that overloading static 
has a cost for people once they've learnt the language, or that 
learning the meanings is a significant obstacle. There's the cost 
of new keywords breaking existing code, unless they start with 
`__`. Also learners may get confused about 2 forms of syntax as 
long as the `static` syntax variant is supported.

IMO we should use editions to fix bug-prone features, reduce 
unnecessary complexity or fix badly implemented features. I think 
there should be a reasonable limit to the amount of breakage when 
upgrading editions, prioritized by need. Just redesigning syntax 
needs quite a high bar to justify it.

> For completeness this are things that the D team have wanted to 
> add or change over the years:
> - Constructor syntax

Recently there has been discussion of explicit this parameters, 
but I don't know that removal of current syntax would happen. 
Additions can happen without an edition.

> - Pattern Matching
> - Import C++