On Monday, April 18, 2016 13:10:59 jmh530 via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On Monday, 18 April 2016 at 12:11:46 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > Regardless, changing any of the attributes now would break a > > _lot_ of code, and such a change would have to be worth the > > pain that it would cause, which is questinonable. > > dfix has a DIP64 switch, right?
Yes, because the person who created DIP64 created dfix. But there is no consensus that DIP64 should be adopted, and based on how Walter has typically responded to changes that will break code, I very much doubt that having dfix make the change easy would be sufficient for him to decide that the code breakage that would result from changing the attributes would be acceptable. Honestly, I think that DIP64 is a poster boy for unnecessary churn. Sure, in theory, it would be nice to make the attributes more consistent, but ultimately, it's yet another case of renaming stuff without actually adding or otherwise changing functionality. We got enough screaming when we made changes like that 5 years ago even though they did make Phobos more consistent. And a _lot_ more code has been written since then. So, that much more code will be affected by such a change whether the change is theoretically desirable or not. And while having a tool to make the change relatively easy definitely helps, it doesn't eliminate the cost of the change. It just reduces it. Personally, I think that we're well past the point where doing renaming like this is worth it - especially with the language itself. - Jonathan M Davis