[phobos] Deprecation of std.regexp

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On 05.06.2011 12:13, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On 2011-06-05 00:56, Brad Roberts wrote:
>> On 6/5/2011 12:52 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> It looks like std.regexp was marked in its documentation as deprecated in
>>> 2.053. It was not actually deprecated (the deprecation modifier is
>>> missing), but if it has indeed been deprecated (and std.regex has been
>>> around for a while, so it's not exactly a surprise), then it needs to
>>> actually be deprecated, and the rest of Phobos needs to be using
>>> std.regex instead. I can easily deprecate the function (after all, all
>>> you have to do is add deprecated: near the top of the file), but since
>>> I've never used either of the regex modules, I'm ill-suited to convert
>>> the rest of Phobos to use std.regex. So, I'd appreciate it if someone
>>> who is actually familiar with the two modules would convert the rest of
>>> Phobos to use std.regex sometime prior to the next release, and then we
>>> can actually deprecate std.regexp. Worse comes to worst, I can take a
>>> crack at it, but it would be much faster if someone who's familiar with
>>> the regex modules did it.
>>>
>>> Now, we may actually want to change std.regexp to "scheduled for
>>> deprecation" rather than deprecated simply because there are other
>>> functions in Phobos which take stuff from std.regexp but not std.regex
>>> (such as the version of std.file.listdir which takes a RegExp) have not
>>> yet been scheduled for deprecation, let alone deprecated, but
>>> regardless, we need to change the rest of Phobos to use std.regex or we
>>> won't be able to actually deprecate and remove std.regexp (well, I
>>> suppose that we _could_ deprecate it as-is, but it seems to me to be a
>>> bad idea to deprecate something when Phobos is still using it in its API
>>> elsewhere).
>>>
>>> - Jonathan M Davis
>> It was marked deprecated once (check out the blame history of the file),
>> but that was reverted since commonly used modules still use it.  The
>> effect would be that essentially every app would need to be compiled with
>> -d, which is hardly useful.  Until phobos doesn't use it, no real
>> deprecation can actually occur.
> That's essentially my point. Someone needs to convert the rest of Phobos so
> that it uses std.regex instead of std.regexp before we can properly deprecate
> std.regexp (and given all of the stuff in Phobos which still uses std.regexp,
> we should probably make it so that std.regexp is _scheduled_ for deprecation
> rather than deprecated, but the changes still need to be made). Simply marking
> std.regexp as deprecated in its documentation isn't enough. I'm raising the
> issue so that someone who is actually familiar with std.regexp and std.regex
> can do the conversion.
>
Looks like I'm the one best suited for this, since I have extensive 
experience with both modules and their internals.
In fact, I'm doing GSOC project aimed at enhancing current std.regex, 
basically replacing implementation and extending interface quite a bit. 
Still changes going to be backwards compatible, so it's about time to 
switch all phobos to std.regex.
I'll make a pull request soon.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky