• Jonathan M Davis (12/12) Jul 14 2010 I was wondering what the general consesus was (if there is one) on wheth...
• torhu (4/15) Jul 14 2010 Some of the D build tools complain if you don't use module declarations....
• Philippe Sigaud (11/23) Jul 15 2010 I can see two reasons to use module declarations:

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisprog gmail.com> writes:

I was wondering what the general consesus was (if there is one) on whether it's 
valuable to always put module declarations in each module.

Obviously, if you need the module to have a name other than the file name, then 
you need to have the module declaration. However, is it necessarily desirable
to 
have it when the module name matches the file name? Or would there even be a 
reason for it to be desirable _not_ to have the module declaration?

I can't think of any particularly strong reasons to have it or not to have it. 
My first reaction is to just always use it, but thinking about it, I'm not sure 
that there's really much point if the file name and the module name already 
match. Does anyone have reasons why it would matter other than personal 
preference?

- Jonathan M Davis

torhu <no spam.invalid> writes:

On 15.07.2010 00:22, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 I was wondering what the general consesus was (if there is one) on whether it's
 valuable to always put module declarations in each module.

 Obviously, if you need the module to have a name other than the file name, then
 you need to have the module declaration. However, is it necessarily desirable
to
 have it when the module name matches the file name? Or would there even be a
 reason for it to be desirable _not_ to have the module declaration?

 I can't think of any particularly strong reasons to have it or not to have it.
 My first reaction is to just always use it, but thinking about it, I'm not sure
 that there's really much point if the file name and the module name already
 match. Does anyone have reasons why it would matter other than personal
 preference?

Some of the D build tools complain if you don't use module declarations. 
  And IIRC, modules in subdirectories (packages) need to have them.  So 
I end up adding them for anything but single-file test programs.

Philippe Sigaud <philippe.sigaud gmail.com> writes:

I was wondering what the general consesus was (if there is one) on whether
 it's
 valuable to always put module declarations in each module.


 I can't think of any particularly strong reasons to have it or not to have
 it.
 My first reaction is to just always use it, but thinking about it, I'm not
 sure
 that there's really much point if the file name and the module name
 already
 match. Does anyone have reasons why it would matter other than personal
 preference?


I can see two reasons to use module declarations:

- you can put documentation comments before the module declaration, to have
them at the beginning of the docs. That's where you put general indications
on the use of this module, and copyright/author/license indications. I quite
like these module-level docs, personally.

- it defines a new symbol, which you can use in template with alias
parameters and __traits, like in __traits(allMembers, moduleName). If you're
into compile-time introspection, that can be useful.
(though maybe these symobols exist even without module decls, I don't know).


Philippe