On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 20:52:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/24/2013 5:42 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
I agree with you but Walter is very afraid of breaking code.
The history of what happens when D code breaks because of
language changes is not a happy one.
I don't believe that is true. Remember when 'bit' was removed
from the language?
It didn't cause any complaints at all.
This attitude is very harmful. Our real problem is that we're not
making promises about what we won't change. When we haven't made
such promises, we then become fearful of changing *anything*.
Then we bend over backwards to avoid changing things that
actually nobody cares about. This is a recipe for locking bugs
into the language forever.
Instead, we should be trying to continuously expand the things we
guarantee will continue to work. Ideally we would be precise
about the things that are likely to change, and which we don't
currently guarantee.
