On Monday, 26 February 2018 at 16:02:58 UTC, Dukc wrote:
I kinda start to see the idea... Granted, nullable is in a way a range that can hold exactly one or exactly zero elements. Not a bad idea at all.
Aye, ranges do not need nullability indeed. Optional doesn't need to adhere to the range spec of course, but it does provide some conveniences. There's a d-forum thread here on it actually: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/l87ivq$263r$1...@digitalmars.com
There's a link in there on scala's optional type which is a fun read.
Here's a bit on the current "brokenness" nature of java's optional: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/08/optional-broken/
I like how it specifies intent (on the c++ optional): https://www.fluentcpp.com/2016/11/24/clearer-interfaces-with-optionalt/
Boost has a fun write-up on the motivation and design behind its optional type (which was incorporated in to the c++ standard): http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_66_0/libs/optional/doc/html/index.html
Meta: Is this your stuff btw? -> https://github.com/skirino/d-option :) me thinks I may have gotten some inspiration from you if so, so thanks!
But shouldn't it store the value internally as a pointer, not as an array, to save a bit space? When empty, it would point to null.
Guess I could do a pointer and call new when i need to store a value instead. Or maybe it's better to do it like above and store as value type with default value and a boolean at the site. Not sure.
