Jonathan M Davis:
Honestly, I wouldn't even consider distributing something that
was only a
single module in size unless it were on the scale of
std.datetime, which we've
generally agreed is too large for a single module.
So, a single module
wouldn't have enough functionality to be worth distributing.
This reasoning style is similar to the Groucho Marx quote:
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member"
In the Python world online you can find thousands of
single-module projects (few of them are mine). I have plenty of
single D modules that encapsulate a single functionality. In
Haskell cabal you can find many single modules that add
functionality (plus larger projects like Diagrams).
And I think D has to strongly encourage the creation of such
ecosystem of modules that you download and use in your programs.
You can't have everything in the standard library, it's not wise
to re-write them (like 2D vectors, I have already seen them
implemented ten different times in the D world), and there are
plenty of useful things that can be contained in single modules,
especially if such modules can import the functionality of one or
more other modules.
And even if I were to distribute such a module, I'd let its
documentation speak for itself
and otherwise just expect the programmer to read the code.
A demo and the documentation are both useful. And the
documentation can't replace stand-alone functionality.
Regardless, the version specifier makes it easy to have a
version where main is defined for demos or whatever else
you might want to do with it.
Bye,
bearophile
