Deprecate any

[juancarlospaco]

• Deprecate any.

• fixes deprecate any (redundant with auto) RFCs#281

note

when removing any to see what would break if any were removed instead of deprecated, only these packages are affected: chronicles, telebot, sam:

  nim c -o:chr -r chronicles.nim
  /home/runner/work/Nim/Nim/pkgstemp/chronicles/chronicles.nim(161, 31) Error: undeclared identifier: 'any'
  nim c -o:tbot -r src/telebot.nim
  /home/runner/.nimble/pkgs/sam-0.1.16/sam.nim(77, 24) Error: undeclared identifier: 'any'

(refs https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/runs/1823138277)

[arnetheduck]

would break if any were removed instead of deprecated, only these packages are affected:

er.. I'm not sure, but I believe you're not tracking all nim code out there?

Not that I mind deprecating bad ideas (in fact, I support it), but doing so goes against 1.0 guarantees / promises - what's the plan / next step after deprecation? It would be good to manage these expectations so that people that swallowed the "no breaking changes" pill know what's coming.

[juancarlospaco]

We are NOT removing any.

[timotheecour]

er.. I'm not sure, but I believe you're not tracking all nim code out there?

note that I wrote that line (see my edit in top post); obviously this only tracks important_packages.nim, which is a form of canary testing; that's the same for any deprecation introduced before this PR

as @juancarlospaco said this is not a breaking change. Deprecating is a necessary step to help users migrate their code, in particular if next nim version major bump (eg 2.x) turns those deprecations into errors/removes such symbols. Furthermore, it's trivial to ignore deprecation warnings in cmdline/user config (--warning:deprecated:off), or, pending timotheecour#403, in a more targetted way (--warning:deprecated:foo:on|off)

Breaking changes are sometimes the lesser evil to avoid accumulating cruft/bad design/error prone patterns and whether they're acceptable is decided on case by case basis; see nimLegacy* in codebase for examples of past breaking changes.

note

IMO a future PR that would introduce nimLegacyAny would also be acceptable:

when defined(nimLegacyAny):
  any* {.deprecated: "Deprecated since v1.5; Use auto instead.".} = distinct auto

(trivial to enable in your config; not all breaking changes are equally painful)

[juancarlospaco]

Can you review @xflywind so we get more reviews so is "mergeable". Thanks.

[ringabout]

It doesn't break anything, looks good to me.