November 23, 2009
Andrei Alexandrescu, el 23 de noviembre a las 11:43 me escribiste:
> >Again, and in case it's hard to understand, I'm not saying the any patch
> >should be accepted. Even more, I don't think Chad's patched should be
> >accepted, I also think introducing case !: is a bad idea. I'm just saying
> >that the patch was mostly turned down because he didn't asked for other
> >devs permission to make the patch, not because of the quality of the patch
> >(or the feature) itself. That discourages people to make patches, and
> >I think that's *really* bad.
> >
> >Again, that was only my perception, maybe this was not the intention of the people who wrote the messages.
> 
> I understand and agree. One issue we're facing right now is that the publication of the D source is relatively recent and the number of contributors is relatively low. In this context, if we required anyone who ever wants to propose a feature to also provide a patch we'd pretty much kill the traffic on this group. I look forward to the day when that request will become reasonable.

I totally agree. What I'm saying is that providing patches with features request should be *encouraged*, not *required* (and certainly not discouraged! :).

> The positive side remains: Chad now knows enough about the implementation to accommodate any change to the design.

Sure, he might be able to change his patch in a way that has consensus.

> At any rate, after having discussed this more with Walter, it looks like the switch semantics is here to stay. He claims to use fall through fairly often (in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary) and finds the notion that you need to wrote "goto case x;" just before "case x:" completely stupid. I disagree but I also want to carefully pick my fights so I'll leave this matter to others.

Well, you only have to write "goto case;", no need for the label if you only want fall-through.

It's really sad that Walter dismissed this issue, even when nobody else defended the implicit fall-through and even he was proved wrong about his own frequency of use.


Come on, Walter! =)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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November 24, 2009
Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Leandro Lucarella <llucax@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm just saying
>> that the patch was mostly turned down because he didn't asked for other
>> devs permission to make the patch, not because of the quality of the patch
>> (or the feature) itself. That discourages people to make patches, and
>> I think that's *really* bad.
> 
> Don may have said that not discussing a change before submitting a
> patch for it dooms the patch to failure, but I don't think that's true
> at all.  I think it just means that the chances the patch will solve
> the problem in a way that is agreeable to those who matter is much
> smaller.  But if Chad had managed to hit on the magic formula that
> everyone thought was a great solution, I think the patch would have
> been accepted (after some inevitable discussion).

I'm making an observation. AFAIK such patches have never been accepted.

> In this case, had Chad discussed the matter first, I think he would
> have quickly found that there was little support for his syntax
> extension, and he could have saved himself the trouble of implementing
> it.

Yes. It's such a shame, when there are so many bugs open in Bugzilla, that someone spends time on a patch which you can say apriori that it will fail.

BTW, even my opDollar() patch has not recieved _any_ comment from Walter.
He made a negative comment about opPow(), so at this stage it's not likely to get in. A single negative comment is typically the only feedback you'll get. In this case, Walter made a negative comment *before* the patch was made! In those circumstances, you're really wasting your time.
November 24, 2009
Don Wrote:

> Bill Baxter wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Leandro Lucarella <llucax@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I'm just saying
> >> that the patch was mostly turned down because he didn't asked for other
> >> devs permission to make the patch, not because of the quality of the patch
> >> (or the feature) itself. That discourages people to make patches, and
> >> I think that's *really* bad.
> > 
> > Don may have said that not discussing a change before submitting a patch for it dooms the patch to failure, but I don't think that's true at all.  I think it just means that the chances the patch will solve the problem in a way that is agreeable to those who matter is much smaller.  But if Chad had managed to hit on the magic formula that everyone thought was a great solution, I think the patch would have been accepted (after some inevitable discussion).
> 
> I'm making an observation. AFAIK such patches have never been accepted.
> 
> > In this case, had Chad discussed the matter first, I think he would have quickly found that there was little support for his syntax extension, and he could have saved himself the trouble of implementing it.
> 
> Yes. It's such a shame, when there are so many bugs open in Bugzilla, that someone spends time on a patch which you can say apriori that it will fail.


What's also a shame is that I've tried to solicit from Walter which changes he'd be open to. It was an attempt at getting a varied list so that inspired individuals could pick an item and run with it.  For the most part, I failed. Walter did suggest two gdb compatibility issues. Andrei's response about Phobos was better, but still seemed lacking to me :(

I've largely given up on trying to make things friendlier to community involvement.
November 25, 2009
Hello Chad,

> Don wrote:
> 
>> I think you've just created the strongest argument AGAINST this
>> feature: that it makes it too hard for machine-generated code.
>> Forget the !: hack. No chance.
>> 
> If that's the strongest argument, then this is cake.  I'll go through
> Phobos and insert goto case's by hand if that's what needs to happen.
> 
> Most of the fallthrough I saw was stuff like this:
> 
> case '1': case '2': case '3':
> case '4': case '5': case '6':
> case '7': case '8': case '9':
> ...etc...
> break;
> Without fallthrough this is easily rewritten as

Without fall through, this doesn't even need to be rewritten as all the labels are just alias to the same thing. Even in C# where fall thought (even of the "goto case;" type is forbidden, fall thought is defined where there is actual code between the labels.


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