On 9/6/11 5:16 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, September 06, 2011 17:01:28 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 9/6/11 4:52 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, September 06, 2011 17:03:30 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
The names inside std.system.Endian were changed from UpperCamelCase to
lowerCamelCase, which makes sense, but maybe the old names should
still
exist for migration?
Yu can't rename enum values without breaking code. Any final switches
would be broken if you left in the old values as would anything using
std.traits.EnumMembers.
I think EnumMembers is used rarely enough to not warrant much worry. If
final switch fails to compile because it doesn't handle all aliases of
the same value, that's a bug in the compiler. So I think keeping old
values alongside new ones is good practice.
I don't know how rare EnumMembers usage is, but it's definitely used. I use it
in unit tests and the like. It's probably not a big issue for
std.system.Endian though. Regardless, it was discussed in the pull request. I
said that I hadn't provided duplicate enum values with the old names, and you
merged it in that way.
Doesn't mean we're sworn into that, and now that the problem was raised
by a second person, I thought I'd put it back on the plate.
A simple renaming is caught and pointed out quite well
by the compiler's spellchecker.
Code breakage is what it is.
True. But this is easy-to-fix code breakage. My point is that you _can't_ avoid
code breakage when renaming enums. It's just a question of what code you're
going to break, how easy such breakage is going to fix, and how common it is.
Renamings are going to be more common but very easy to fix. Something like
EnumMembers may be less common, but it's going to be more subtle when it
breaks, and the code which uses it would have to be changed to explicitly
ignore duplicate enum values, which could be problematic.
I don't quite buy into this all. Anyway, perhaps an EnumDistinctMembers
abstraction would be the best outcome of this discussion.
Andrei
_______________________________________________
dmd-beta mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-beta
