On Feb 1, 2014, at 2:39 PM, Corey Richardson <[email protected]> wrote:

> The immediate, and most pragmatic, problem is that in today's Rust one cannot
> easily search for implementations of a trait. Why? `grep 'impl Clone'` is
> itself not sufficient, since many types have parametric polymorphism. Now I
> need to come up with some sort of regex that can handle this. An easy
> first-attempt is `grep 'impl(<.*?>)? Clone'` but that is quite inconvenient to
> type and remember. (Here I ignore the issue of tooling, as I do not find the
> argument of "But a tool can do it!" valid in language design.)

Putting your other arguments aside, I am not convinced by the grep argument.
With the syntax as it is today, I use `grep 'impl.*Clone'` if I want to find 
Clone
impls. Yes, it can match more than just Clone impls. But that's true too even 
with this
change. At the very least, any sort of multiline comment or string can contain 
text that
matches even the most rigorously specified grep. The only way to truly 
guarantee you're
only matching real impls is to actually parse the file with a real parser.

-Kevin
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