May 15, 2010
Walter Bright:
> I know the hardcoding is probably not the best, but I wanted to try it out to see if it was a good feature before committing a lot of work to it.

In general I approve the idea of doing similar experiments. Often you have enough information to choose well only when you try a feature.

Regarding the stack trace, I don't like the idea of having it only in debug mode. I like to always (on default) have a stack trace when there is an error, but when the code is compiled in release mode. So you tell the compiler when you don't want the stack trace, instead of the opposite.

Bye,
bearophile
May 15, 2010
bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:
> Walter Bright:
> > I know the hardcoding is probably not the best, but I wanted to try
> > it out to
> > see if it was a good feature before committing a lot of work to it.
> 
> In general I approve the idea of doing similar experiments. Often you have enough information to choose well only when you try a feature.
> 
> Regarding the stack trace, I don't like the idea of having it only in debug mode. I like to always (on default) have a stack trace when there is an error, but when the code is compiled in release mode. So you tell the compiler when you don't want the stack trace, instead of the opposite.
> 

I made this change a few days ago, after Brad suggested the same thing. It was just a tad late for 2.046.  With luck I'll have stack tracing sorted out on Windows before 2.047 as well.
May 15, 2010
Don, el 15 de mayo a las 09:47 me escribiste:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> >Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> >>I saw the patches, and having all hardcoded in the compiler doesn't seems like a good idea =/
> >
> >I know the hardcoding is probably not the best, but I wanted to try it out to see if it was a good feature before committing a lot of work to it.
> >
> >The alternative is to use some sort of configuration file for it. The problem, though, is that the hints are for newbies, and newbies probably aren't going to get a configuration file properly set up, especially if there are multiple such files.
> 
> I think the only purpose of such a feature is to increase the chance that a newbie's "hello world" compiles successfully. The importance of that can't be underestimated, I think. First impressions matter.

Looks OK from that POV, my fear was that we had all phobos harcoded in the compiler to give hints.

I think the feature could be nice if it needs no configuration at all (it searches the import path and looks for modules where a missing symbol is). I guess that would be too slow to be practical though, but maybe the compiler can generate a small index file (a reduced json with just symbol->module) and that can be pre-generated for phobos and distributed with the compiler. The good part of this is you can easily extend it for your libraries.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145  104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05)
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Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you.
May 15, 2010
Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 5/15/10 11:00, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Apple's web site isn't much better, it's got to be the most hard to read
>> site I've ever encountered. The text is a faint grey on white, of all
>> things, and the font is so poorly rendered my eyes turn red and painful
>> after a while reading it. I have to actually select the text in order to
>> read it. I find this astonishing, am I doing something wrong?
> 
> Looking at Apple's developer site and the API reference, for me the body of the text is black using firefox, some minor parts are in gray.

I'm using firefox. Even on their main developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action, most of the text is light grey on white.

Now click on "getting started documents", which brings you to a page that will not render in Explorer or Firefox, only Safari.

In the docs themselves, a very light blue font is used for links that is illegible. The code examples in the docs are even lighter grey on white. Couple this with the unusually small font used, and it's literally painful to read.

For a company that prides itself on excellent readability, I am astonished, and I can't believe I'm the only one with problems reading their pages.
May 15, 2010
Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> I think the feature could be nice if it needs no configuration at all (it
> searches the import path and looks for modules where a missing symbol is).

The problem with that is often newbies have trouble setting up import paths.
May 15, 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 5/15/10 11:00, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Apple's web site isn't much better, it's got to be the most hard to read site I've ever encountered. The text is a faint grey on white, of all things, and the font is so poorly rendered my eyes turn red and painful after a while reading it. I have to actually select the text in order to read it. I find this astonishing, am I doing something wrong?
>>
>> Looking at Apple's developer site and the API reference, for me the body of the text is black using firefox, some minor parts are in gray.
> 
> I'm using firefox. Even on their main developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action, most of the text is light grey on white.
> 
	Text is black here. But it is very thin, are you sure this isn't an
anti-aliasing issue?

> Now click on "getting started documents", which brings you to a page that will not render in Explorer or Firefox, only Safari.
> 
	Works fine here. Firefox 3.6.3 on Linux.

		Jerome
-- 
mailto:jeberger@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeberger@jabber.fr



May 15, 2010
Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> On 5/15/10 11:00, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Apple's web site isn't much better, it's got to be the most hard to read
>>>> site I've ever encountered. The text is a faint grey on white, of all
>>>> things, and the font is so poorly rendered my eyes turn red and painful
>>>> after a while reading it. I have to actually select the text in order to
>>>> read it. I find this astonishing, am I doing something wrong?
>>> Looking at Apple's developer site and the API reference, for me the
>>> body of the text is black using firefox, some minor parts are in gray.
>> I'm using firefox. Even on their main
>> developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action, most of the text is light grey
>> on white.
>>
> 	Text is black here. But it is very thin, are you sure this isn't an
> anti-aliasing issue?

It's #323232

So I would say it's grey like the one you find in a banana's stone.

...

http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
May 15, 2010
Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> On 5/15/10 11:00, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Apple's web site isn't much better, it's got to be the most hard to read
>>>> site I've ever encountered. The text is a faint grey on white, of all
>>>> things, and the font is so poorly rendered my eyes turn red and painful
>>>> after a while reading it. I have to actually select the text in order to
>>>> read it. I find this astonishing, am I doing something wrong?
>>> Looking at Apple's developer site and the API reference, for me the
>>> body of the text is black using firefox, some minor parts are in gray.
>> I'm using firefox. Even on their main
>> developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action, most of the text is light grey
>> on white.
>>
> 	Text is black here. But it is very thin, are you sure this isn't an
> anti-aliasing issue?

Yes, because there is some legible black text on other parts of the page.


>> Now click on "getting started documents", which brings you to a page
>> that will not render in Explorer or Firefox, only Safari.
>>
> 	Works fine here. Firefox 3.6.3 on Linux.

3.0.18 on Ubuntu.
May 15, 2010
Walter Bright Wrote:

> Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> > On 5/15/10 11:00, Walter Bright wrote:
> >> Apple's web site isn't much better, it's got to be the most hard to read site I've ever encountered. The text is a faint grey on white, of all things, and the font is so poorly rendered my eyes turn red and painful after a while reading it. I have to actually select the text in order to read it. I find this astonishing, am I doing something wrong?
> > 
> > Looking at Apple's developer site and the API reference, for me the body of the text is black using firefox, some minor parts are in gray.
> 
> I'm using firefox. Even on their main developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action, most of the text is light grey on white.
> 
> Now click on "getting started documents", which brings you to a page that will not render in Explorer or Firefox, only Safari.
> 
> In the docs themselves, a very light blue font is used for links that is illegible. The code examples in the docs are even lighter grey on white. Couple this with the unusually small font used, and it's literally painful to read.
> 
> For a company that prides itself on excellent readability, I am astonished, and I can't believe I'm the only one with problems reading their pages.

The link works for me (The getting started page) with Firefox. I agree about the colors, they're not the best combination, e.g. this piece of code gray on light-blue:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/AdvancedURLConnections/Listings/ChallengeHandlers_AuthenticationChallengeHandler_m.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40009558-ChallengeHandlers_AuthenticationChallengeHandler_m-DontLinkElementID_11

There's an option in Firefox to force the rendering of text using system defined colors. Try Tools>Options>Content tab>Colors button> and check "Use system colors" and uncheck "Allow pages to user their own colors".

But this only works globally afaik. There's a Download button on top of those examples for a zipped collection of the samples, which is kind of neat actually.

Maybe there's a plugin for Firefox that can force some colors on individual websites, I'll have a look later.


May 15, 2010
Sean Kelly:
> I made this change a few days ago, after Brad suggested the same thing. It was just a tad late for 2.046.  With luck I'll have stack tracing sorted out on Windows before 2.047 as well.

Sometimes I complain, but I am very grateful for all the work you and others put in D and its libs.

Thank you,
bye,
bearophile