On Thursday, 25 June 2015 at 21:06:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 6/25/2015 12:48 PM, Mathias Lang via Digitalmars-d wrote:
And he's right. It is really annoying to update to a new
version and have
perfectly valid and working code breaking because someone had
a nice idea.
Ideally, we should only ever break code that has a bug in it.
I've also been willing to break code if it involves significant
performance, usability, or correctness improvements. Renaming,
though, doesn't provide that.
Deprecation is *not* breakage. Removal is.
This isn't like final-by-default where there can be only one
default. We can have redundant names as long as the user can
know why they exist (documentation comment) and which is
preferred (deprecated attribute).
I suggest deprecation without removal (i.e. removal by Walter
only).
The .Net Framework has had deprecated names since 2.0 (10 years
ago) and you can still use them today and likely will be able to
in the far future. And the fact that deprecation warnings are off
by default in D already makes it ultra-conservative.
Mike
