On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 11:57:05 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
Furthermore there remain various ideas that would avoid the
original ambiguity. Whether such changes are worthwhile is up
for discussion and would benefit from someone taking the lead.
I really like psychoRabbit's array syntax suggestion. I see no
reason the old syntax can't be kept around only for trailing
symbols, while requiring the array syntax for selective import
chains.
I still think that local imports are nice for being explicit
and toolable but have the downside of being brittle.
Something like bash style expansion could help to hit a sweet
spot IMHO.
import std.{algorithm : {find, findSplit}, stdio : writeln};
import
std.experimental.allocator.building_blocks.{free_list, region};
But certainly anything in that direction requires time and
research, which I don't have for that topic.
Sure, it will require someone willing to implement it, not you.
In hindsight the voting experiment on
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6589 might have prevented
useful early feedback and thinking.
Given the effort required for a language change, it's seductive
to streamline seemingly small changes, but it certainly
increases the risk of design mistakes, thanks for appealing
against this one.
Reflecting further on your pull during this debate, my initial
suggestion that it would cause a bunch of errors was probably
overblown, readability is the main issue. The ambiguity you
expanded on was fine if only limited to one set of trailing
symbols, it became too hard to parse when a bunch of selective
imports were chained.
I hope someone steps us to implement this feature with better
syntax, though it will require more effort than your simple
patch, as I do see the need for it.
