On Saturday, 17 October 2015 at 11:27:39 UTC, Shriramana Sharma
wrote:
... I'm not sure why the toImpl and parse functions are even
publicly documented. People shouldn't need to know about them.
As the documentation briefly explains on std.conv.to, all of the
overloads of to are toImpl, and we obviously need to document the
overloads (particularly considering how diverse they are), so you
unfortunately end up with toImpl in the documentation even though
it's essentially an implementation detail. All you have to do is
use to every time you see toImpl.
Obviously, that's not exactly ideal, but I suspect that at the
time that std.conv.to was created, there wasn't much choice.
std.conv.to has been around for quite a while, and eponymous
templates have improved quite a bit since then. It should be
possible now for all of the toImpl overloads to be moved inside
of std.conv.to and have them all be called std.conv.to, but I'm
not sure that that was possible when std.conv.to was introduced.
However, unless something like DIP 82 is implmented (
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP82 ), it would actually be pretty
problematic to move all of those overloads inside of the the main
to template, because it would either mean putting all of those
unittest blocks inside of that template (very bad idea) or
separating each of the unittest blocks from the overloads that
they're testing (also a very bad idea). So, at least for now, it
just makes more sense to have toImpl. And if it confused you,
then sorry, but the documentation does at least try to make it
clear, and all of the examples use to, not toImpl. At least now
that you know, it really shouldn't be a problem reading those
docs anymore.
- Jonathan M Davis
