Andrei Alexandrescu:
[1, 2, 3, 4].map!(n => n.writeln).reduce;
I have to shot this down for many reasons:
I think it's better to give that final function a different name
(like "consume" or something like that) because it's used for
very different purposes and it returns nothing. Re-using the name
"reduce" doesn't reduce the amount of Phobos lines of code, it
doesn't make the user code simpler to understand, it's more
obscure because it's more semantically overloaded, and it's not
more easy to find in the documentation by the future D users.
Function names are not language keywords, packing different
purposes in the same name as "static" doesn't give any advantage,
and only disadvantages.
And using map with a lambda that returns nothing is not a style I
like :-( It's probably better to encourage D programmers to give
pure lambdas to map/filter, for several reasons (safety,
cleanness, code style, future D front-end optimizations done on
those higher order functions, to allow a better debuggability,
and to avoid Phobos bugs like
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9674 ). So I think
it's better to introduce a new Phobos function like tap() that
accepts a function/delegate with side effects that takes no input
arguments.
Bye,
bearophile
