On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 13:13:56 UTC, Daniel Murphy wrote:

Also, compress is a ridiculously general name for a function.

We have module-level functions called "copy" (multiple), "read", "write", "map", etc. already, and it's not a bad thing!

It's OK because the full name is not "compress", but "std.compression.lz77.compress". This way, how specific the code wants to be depends on the user and the particular use-case, instead of one-size-fits-all alternatives like "lz77Compress". There's no redundancy in the name yet we still have the option to be pin-point specific (e.g. static import), and yes, we still get to use UFCS!

To eliminate the UFCS problem - which doesn't happen very often (how often do you want to use two different compression algorithms in the same unit?), we can (must?) use renamed symbols when importing.

I have found a better way to do that: see http://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.1002.1370829729.13711.digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com

subject: 'best way to handle UFCS with ambiguous names: using std.typetuple.Alias!'

syntax: 'arg1.Alias!(std.file.write).arg2'*

see related discussion for reasoning. I'd like to push this as standard way to deal with ambiguities.

Since any example using multiple "compress" functions would be contrived, I'll use an existing conflict - the case of "copy".

The following program backs up the specified files and writes a nicely formatted message to stdout (OK, so a tiny bit contrived):
----
void main(string[] args)
{
import std.algorithm : chain, copy, joiner;
import std.array : empty;
import std.file : fileCopy = copy; // `fileCopy` is std.file.copy
import std.stdio : stdout;

auto fileNames = args[1 .. $];

foreach(fileName; fileNames)
fileName.fileCopy(fileName ~ ".bak");

if(!fileNames.empty)
"Backed up the following files: "
.chain(fileNames.joiner(", "))
.copy(stdout.lockingTextWriter());
}
----

By eliminating redundancies from symbol names, we empower the user, and the module system offers all the tools necessary to solve conflicts in a variety of ways.