On Monday, 27 January 2014 at 14:27:42 UTC, Regan Heath wrote:
On Sat, 25 Jan 2014 10:15:28 -0000, Peter Alexander
<peter.alexander...@gmail.com> wrote:
Special cases are pure evil. There's nothing special about
strings in this case.
This is a tangent to my suggestion.
I am arguing for domain specific language (aliases) where
sensible, not domain specific functions. If canFind can
already handle all the desirable string cases, perfect, but
lets alias it in std.string as "contains" so that people find
what they expect to find first time and don't get frustrated
looking for the correct generic name for the functionality they
want.
There are likely other cases where we already have all the
functionality in a nice generic function, but people struggle
to find it because it has a suitably generic name.
I just want us to lower the bar for beginners coming from other
languages like Java and C#.
R
I think that is a small short-term learning advantage but huge
long-term damage for code readability. Now you suddenly need to
not only remember what Phobos can do but also all defined aliases
for that stuff.
What could have been awesome is to be able to define such aliases
via DDOC so that IDE's can understand them and list in
auto-completion, while still putting "real" name in source code.
It would have solved discoverability issue without harming naming
consistency.
