On Monday, 14 May 2012 at 02:35:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Monday, May 14, 2012 02:53:20 Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
Hi,
Would anyone be terribly angry if equals_t was deprecated and
later
removed? I sent a patch a while back to add a compare_t type
for
consistency, but the consensus ended up being that it'd be
better to get
rid of equals_t.
I definitely think that it should be killed. It's ludicrous for
a function
whose result is boolean to ever return anything other than
bool. If it wer
returning something which was _convertible_ to bool but had
other uses (e.g.
in), then that would be different, but that's not the case with
opEquals at
all.
equals_t is not mentioned in TDPL (rather, TDPL specifically
lists opEquals as
returning bool), and I see _zero_ value in having bool at this
point. As I
understand it, it was created purely for transitional purposes
(since D1 made
the mistake of having opEquals return int), and I really don't
think that
that's necessary or particularly helpful at this point.
- Jonathan M Davis
Well said. I was just scoping through the documentation of the
Object class to investigate a statement someone made and I found
that opEquals returned equals_t. Wanting to make sure I
understood why, I started looking for a definition of equals_t
and I ended up here, reading this thread. I don't see why someone
would like to treat the result as a value other than a simple
bool. But I do understand the need for transition. My vote is
kill it, and make it painless :).
Phil
