A short report on component programming and ranges.
A lot of my code deals with transforming and reformatting input,
e.g. text is split into sentences and words for grammatical
parsing (part of speech) and phonetic transcriptions. I'm using D
ranges and component programming and I'm quite happy with
"one-liners" like
foreach
(bySentence().byWord().byWhateverFormat().byReformatAgain()) {
// Whatever
}
The code is much easier to maintain, neater and more efficient
within each component.
Sometimes, however, I wonder how I should design my ranges. It is
hard to decide whether to use them as pure pipes or semi-output
ranges. "Semi" because they're not sinks as defined by put() but
still they can hold data (an array of reformatted strings for
example) that could be accessed by using Range.data. I'm not sure
as regards "best practice" and whether or not I'm wasting
resources by storing data internally. On the other hand, it might
be handy to have access to the data stored internally. Does
anyone have a rough guide to D ranges? Like Case 1: Use XYZ, Case
2: Use ZYX etc.
(I've read this tutorial http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/ranges.html,
and I'd like to thank Ali for that! It helped me a lot.)
Another issue I've come across is how to integrate CP and ranges
into an OO framework. I figure that ranges are good work horses,
but it makes sense to keep the overall logic in an OO fashion. Or
could it be that D's structs and ranges will replace OOP as we no
it (a class-free system).
