On 09/09/13 05:46, Manu wrote:
For the record, I tend to agree with the arguments of many in the 'against' camp *from a purist point of view*, but the problem remains, and the reason I raised it; this has demonstrated to me and my colleagues on a number of occasions that it is a consistent productivity hindrance.
For what it's worth, I think this kind of baptism-by-fire practical experience is very valuable, and that it's worth considering carefully even if the final decision is not to implement the requested feature.
Question: do you have any access to information about similar short-deadline programming activity using other languages (Java, C# ...) that also forbid the separation of declaration and definition, and how devs using those languages cope with that? It might offer an alternative solution that no one here has thought of.
I support this DIP, obviously, but I'd suggest perhaps a conservative restriction that definitions should only be allowed to appear within the same module as the declaration. This would seem to simplify things like mangling issues and access rights. In my own use case, I have no reason to spread definitions across files. I just want to see class outlines clearly summarised at the top of the file. This saves time, and time is money.
I think the conservative approach is probably correct -- the class outline and the function definitions should have to be in the same module, and the outline and definitions should match precisely. Any mismatch (including in variable names)? Compile error. A function in the outline that isn't implemented? Compile error. A function implemented that isn't in the outline? Compile error. That should greatly reduce the possibility of error caused by code duplication.
Then it simply becomes a question of deciding if the manual labour of writing separate outlines and definitions is worth it. I guess this is probably somewhere where a tool really _can_ be useful, to ensure that the definitions and the outline stay in sync.
Writing D code in this way should probably be disapproved of in the D style guidelines, but with the proviso that it's there for the circumstances where it really is useful.
