Leandro Lucarella wrote:
retard, el 23 de noviembre a las 17:34 me escribiste:
Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:18:05 -0300, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu, el 22 de noviembre a las 17:11 me escribiste:
Anyway, I think Chad's proposal has not been discussed here before
being implemented, which makes it more difficult to accept.
I think the exact opposite. It's much easier to accept (or reject)
something that have an actual implementation. You can talk about
something real, not vaporware. I wish all proposals made here were
proposed with a patch.
Of course that's a lot of work and people usually don't want to make the
effort to write a patch if chances are it will be rejected. But if the
rules are clear ("your patch can be rejected"), I think you should
encourage feature proposal with proof-of-concept patch.
The fact that a patch already exists does not make the design decision
any better. If we all started writing crappy, contradicting extensions
and Walter had to accept everything, D would quickly sink. There are only
a handful of active members in this community that have enough experience
and skills to propose any good features at this point of d development
cycle.
And what I said above doesn't contradict this, on the contrary.
In other OSS projects, almost the *only* way to ask for a feature is
providing a patch. Then the feature is discussed (and most of the time
discarded). Having a patch only improves the decision making process.
Again, and in case it's hard to understand, I'm not saying the any patch
should be accepted. Even more, I don't think Chad's patched should be
accepted, I also think introducing case !: is a bad idea. I'm just saying
that the patch was mostly turned down because he didn't asked for other
devs permission to make the patch, not because of the quality of the patch
(or the feature) itself. That discourages people to make patches, and
I think that's *really* bad.
Again, that was only my perception, maybe this was not the intention of
the people who wrote the messages.
I understand and agree. One issue we're facing right now is that the
publication of the D source is relatively recent and the number of
contributors is relatively low. In this context, if we required anyone
who ever wants to propose a feature to also provide a patch we'd pretty
much kill the traffic on this group. I look forward to the day when that
request will become reasonable.
The positive side remains: Chad now knows enough about the
implementation to accommodate any change to the design.
At any rate, after having discussed this more with Walter, it looks like
the switch semantics is here to stay. He claims to use fall through
fairly often (in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary) and
finds the notion that you need to wrote "goto case x;" just before "case
x:" completely stupid. I disagree but I also want to carefully pick my
fights so I'll leave this matter to others.
Andrei
