https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1985
[email protected] changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status|RESOLVED |REOPENED Resolution|WONTFIX |--- --- Comment #22 from [email protected] --- I use this feature from time to time, and I disagree that the primary use is to import modules. That's confusing it with the other use of the `import` keyword which has nothing to do with this feature, which is to read a file at compile-time and process it at compile-time. You cannot use std.file.read at compile-time, BTW. One use case I have is to embed the contents of a file in a D program. (N.B. not to be confused with loading a file at runtime.) Since the compiler cannot possibly tell whether a file contains text or binary data (or, for that matter, non-UTF-8 text data), it should not assume the data can be sanely interpreted as `string`. Therefore, ubyte[] is the appropriate return type, not `string`. (Though admittedly, this can be remedied with a cast to ubyte[]. It's ugly, nonetheless.) Finally, I disagree with closing this bug simply because it's old. Walter himself often states that bugs should not be closed merely because they are old or have not been receiving attention. A bug is a bug, regardless of age or attention, and should be left open as long as the issue still exists. We should not optimizing on metrics in place of actually improving the language / compiler. Unless Walter/Atila has explicitly decided that this issue will not be fixed, it should remain open. --
