James Miller:
and most people don't have the compiler
suddenly pull the rug from underneath them (unless they were
relying on the buggy behaviour).
Relying on "buggy behavior" (or on deprecated features) is not
rare. An example:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7736
Fixing this will cause some problems, and the more we wait, the
more problems it will cause (and this stuff _must_ be fixed):
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3934
There are several other similar examples. Like enforcing
properties and requiring override, and generally using deprecated
features like complex numbers. The more we wait now, the more
pain will be felt later.
Walter now likes to design D features strict at first and then
"loosen" them later, this has worked quite well (this has
happened with inout and pure). But Walter has not applied this
strategy since the beginning on "tags" as shown in issue 3934,
that are managed in an very very sloppy way now, and will need to
be tightened later to produce a decent enough language.
Bye,
bearophile
