On 6/10/15 8:41 AM, Brian Rogoff wrote:
I agree with you, Walter, that mutual recursion amongst imports is
usually bad, but I think you inadvertently made the right decision by
allowing it in D, and that the bug should be fixed. If people overuse it
to write messy code then the community should tell them to write that
code better.
I agree. I'm one of those folks who think circular dependencies are
fine, thank you very much, and the few cases in which it causes problems
should be flagged and diagnosed in a principled way.
Everybody also likes:
* recursion and mutual recursion of any depth (there's a lot more of it
going in the usual programs than one might think)
* recursive and mutually recursive types
* declaring top level names in any order and they just "work"
But all of a sudden, people get sugar in their gasoline and sand in
their gears when they hear of the same thing applied to modules. I
suspect it's because some legacy languages didn't quite do a stellar job
at it. Figuring that stuff out and pointing out problems is exactly the
kind of thing computers are good at and humans, not so good.
Andrei
