On Tuesday, 27 January 2015 at 03:54:09 UTC, Zach the Mystic
wrote:
On Tuesday, 27 January 2015 at 03:33:15 UTC, Jonathan Marler
wrote:
This has come up before. I believe if was at DConf 2014 that
Walter answered this question. If I remember, the gist was
that Walter didn't like the idea that the compiler could
rewrite a user's code, he seemed kinda "creeped" out to think
that a compiler would do this. Then someone suggested the
compiler could generate some type of awk expression that the
programmer could run to modify the code. Anyway, just
relaying what I remember.
It's only creepy if it doesn't work. And the compiler doesn't
need to change the code itself - it merely needs to tell you
exactly what to do to fix it.
I've thought about this some more. The way I would do it is
have the compiler store all files which need to be fixed.
Output the list in another file of a different type. Have dfix
be able to read that file and automatically fix all files
listed. Or just generate a D script to do just that (no need
for a whole different file format. Literally just output
"dfix.d", which has all the filenames built right into the
script, and tell the user to 'dmd -run dfix.d'. Now you have a
very clear intermediate step between compilation and
user-activated step.
Not a bad idea. Maybe this will be less "creepy" to others :)
+1 (what do others think?)
