Re: [AD] official beta (Re namespace again)

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 01:42:03PM +0100, Martijn Versteegh wrote:
> IMO it is best to do all api-changing from 4.0->5.0. Just Don't add any
> new functionality.  So we would prefix, swap src/dest in draw_sprite,
> unify the underscore usage, unify the textout routines (which are ok the
> way they are to me, but I suppose it would be more logical if textout
> and textprintf would have the same order of arguments)

I think my proposal has been misunderstood: I wasn't meaning to change
_only_ the text functions, this was just an example of how convulted
names have gotten through Allegro's evolution, something which Peter
correctly summed up with those new function names.  My proposal was that
since the prefixing was going to effectively break binary compatibility,
it was also a great chance to change the whole API.

Somebody posted a proposition to do this in two steps, first the
prefixing, then the name rewrites. This is silly, if you want to force
people to change their code twice, they are going to look weird at you :)

However, if you include a functional improvement over the older API
along with the prefixed api, people will look at it not only as something
which was needed to do to avoid name clashes but also a step towards a
better Allegro.

Put it in other words: if you only prefix everything, the average joe
programmer will scratch his head and say "and this what for?". If you put
together a nice brand new API, joe will say "cool, it was easy before,
now it will be even easier to remember those function names".

> For once I stringly disagree with Shawn Hargreaves (which hasn't happened
> much in the history of allegro ;-).

AFAICS Shawn's opinion was to not maintain two different APIs, to which
I agree.

-- 
 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gradha@xxxxxxxxxx   http://gradha.infierno.org/