On Wednesday, July 25, 2012 19:36:27 dnewbie wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 July 2012 at 17:24:06 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > I was just playing with the beta, and got this among the sea of errors:
> > 
> > arsd/cgi.d(898): Error: function std.algorithm.indexOf!("a ==
> > b",ubyte[],string).indexOf is deprecated
> > 
> > 
> > Why was that taken out? If you ask me, the root cause of D's
> > perceived stability problem has little to do with bugs. It
> > is 95% phobos devs removing functionality at random. Why do we
> > keep doing this?
> 
> One of my programs stopped working in 2.060. It is *really* annoying when I see the message 'X is deprecated'.

If it makes you feel any better, the number of things getting deprecated has gone down considerably. Almost all of the changes related to deprecations in 2.060 are deprecated items being removed, not stuff being scheduled for deprecation or stuff being deprecated.  Everything that was deprecated has been scheduled for deprecation and marked as such for _at least_ 6 months. _Most_ of it is stuff that was scheduled for deprecation a long time ago (years ago in some cases) but never actually deprecated (though it looks like some of that is missing from the changelog; I'll need to add it). I made an effort to clean up that stuff and got a good chunk of it taken care of for 2.060 (though unfortunately, not all of it). And with that taken care of and the number of items being scheduled for deprecation having been dropping off considerably, we should be approaching the point where only rare items get deprecated if even that.

So, yes deprecations are annoying, and we were doing quite a few for a while as we cleaned a number of things up that needed cleaning up (a number of which were clamored for by those in the newsgroup - e.g. making the names of Phobos, functions consistent), but it's been tailing off and is approaching the point where it will be rare.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, July 25, 2012 11:52:51 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/25/2012 10:24 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > Why was that taken out? If you ask me, the root cause of D's
> > perceived stability problem has little to do with bugs. It
> > is 95% phobos devs removing functionality at random. Why do we
> > keep doing this?
> 
> For a relevant discussion:
> 
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6277

On a related note, we _really_ need to deprecate all of the stuff in the language that we've been saying for ages that we're getting rid of (e.g. scope variables, delete, the extra comparison operators, etc.). They're still listed in the docs, and people are still using them. The longer that they stay undeprecated, the more code that will break when we actually deprecate them. I'm definitely not arguing that they should be deprecated with this release (that would be obviously far too disruptive given that we've already started the beta process), but we really should try and get that taken care of for 2.061.

- Jonathan M Davis

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.656.1343242698.31962.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> On Wednesday, July 25, 2012 10:55:53 David Gileadi wrote:
>> It might be nicer if you could say:
>>
>> deprecated("Use countUntil instead.") {...}
>
> We want that feature. Daniel Murphy even partially implemented it, but he
> didn't finish it, so we don't have it yet. At this rate, by the time that
> we
> get it, Phobos won't be deprecating anything anymore.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

That's just not true.  My pull request has been sitting there for 9 months.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/463

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.659.1343243693.31962.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
> On a related note, we _really_ need to deprecate all of the stuff in the
> language that we've been saying for ages that we're getting rid of (e.g.
> scope
> variables, delete, the extra comparison operators, etc.). They're still
> listed
> in the docs, and people are still using them. The longer that they stay
> undeprecated, the more code that will break when we actually deprecate
> them.
> I'm definitely not arguing that they should be deprecated with this
> release
> (that would be obviously far too disruptive given that we've already
> started
> the beta process), but we really should try and get that taken care of for
> 2.061.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

A great start would be:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/697 (6 months)

On Thursday, July 26, 2012 14:08:00 Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.656.1343242698.31962.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> 
> > On Wednesday, July 25, 2012 10:55:53 David Gileadi wrote:
> >> It might be nicer if you could say:
> >> 
> >> deprecated("Use countUntil instead.") {...}
> > 
> > We want that feature. Daniel Murphy even partially implemented it, but he
> > didn't finish it, so we don't have it yet. At this rate, by the time that
> > we
> > get it, Phobos won't be deprecating anything anymore.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> That's just not true.  My pull request has been sitting there for 9 months.
> 
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/463

Cool. The only pull request that I was aware of that you'd done was one that implemented more than the message stuff and altered how deprecated worked on some level, but it was decided not to change any of that. And at the time, I believe that you said that you didn't have time to redo it with just the message stuff. I had no idea that you'd done it. Too bad that it hasn't been merged.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, July 26, 2012 14:10:32 Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.659.1343243693.31962.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> 
> > On a related note, we _really_ need to deprecate all of the stuff in the
> > language that we've been saying for ages that we're getting rid of (e.g.
> > scope
> > variables, delete, the extra comparison operators, etc.). They're still
> > listed
> > in the docs, and people are still using them. The longer that they stay
> > undeprecated, the more code that will break when we actually deprecate
> > them.
> > I'm definitely not arguing that they should be deprecated with this
> > release
> > (that would be obviously far too disruptive given that we've already
> > started
> > the beta process), but we really should try and get that taken care of for
> > 2.061.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> A great start would be:
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/697 (6 months)

Yeah. And as I recall, you posted a great list of the language stuff that needed to be deprecated several months back, and that never went anywhere either. I don't know why none of this stuff has been taken care of (especially when there are pull requests for at least some of it). I know that Walter hates deprecating stuff, because it disrupts users, but this is stuff that he agreed on, and the longer that we wait, the more disruptive it will be.

- Jonathan M Davis