On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 21:00:39 +0200, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> It's a common idiom in core.time and std.datetime to use strings to
> represent units when you need to give the units as template arguments.
> If it hade't been strings, it would have been an enum (otherwise, they
> would risk conflicting with local variables and whatnot), in which case
> it would have been even more verbose - e.g. Units.days, Unit.seconds,
> Unit.msecs (and IIRC, I originally had something like that until Anrei
> suggested that I use strings in the original review for std.datetime).
> Also, days, seconds, and msecs are free functions in core.time which
> forward to dur!"days", dur!"seconds", and dur!"msecs", so trying to use
> them on their own would try and use those free functions, which
> obviously isn't what we want at all. I can see why you might want to
> remove the quotes, but they really aren't that bad, and using strings
> for this purpose has turned out to be extremely useful and flexible.
>
> - Jonathn M Davis
Yeah its more of a pipe dream, kinda of how we have moved away from
passing strings and use the short hand versions of lambdas. A CTFE
helper might make it look better, saw this somewhere on the form.
d.splitHelper!q{days, second, msecs}(...)
the function name is not import here just the idea. There is a stdx
project on code.dlang, might be a good place for little helpers like this.
