Deprecating fromIntegral

[Sven Panne]

Am Mo., 10. Aug. 2020 um 09:15 Uhr schrieb Bardur Arantsson <
spam at scientician.net>:

> On 08/08/2020 15.44, Vanessa McHale wrote:
> > -1 from me, massive work to overhaul the ecosystem.
>
> Why would a massive overhaul be necessary for deprecation? If that's the
> case then there's a deeper more serious underlying issue around
> deprecation, IMO.
>

Two things come to my mind here:

   * You'll probably break quite a few projects which use -Werror. I know
that there are different opinions regarding -Werror in general, but in any
case there *will* be breakage.

   * If you consider books and tutorials a part of the ecosystem (which I
definitely do), there is even more "breakage": From the top of my head I
would say that quite a few of them use fromIntegral, so deprecation will
cause confusion.

All these things are definitely fixable, but neither quickly nor without a
negligible cost. Deprecations should not be done lightly.

Regarding the deprecation itself: I fail to see why fromIntegral is worse
than (+), (-), (*), ..., and nobody is proposing to remove these. The real
problem is using fixed-sized numbers where they shouldn't be used, so a -1
from me.

Cheers,
   S.
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