On Monday, 14 December 2015 at 19:04:46 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
It's unanimous, at least among the three of us posting in this
Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3wqt3p/programming_in_d_ebook_is_at_major_retailers_and/cxyqxuz
Something has to be done with the documentation for Phobos
functions that involve ranges and templates. The example I gave
there is
bool isSameLength(Range1, Range2)(Range1 r1, Range2 r2) if
(isInputRange!Range1 && isInputRange!Range2 &&
!isInfinite!Range1 && !isInfinite!Range2);
Unfortunately, that's less ugly than for a lot of functions. In
some circumstances, I can see something like that reminding the
author of the function about some details, but it can only
confuse anyone else.
If you're trying to use Phobos without knowing what template
constraints and ranges are, you're going to have a bad time.
I'm not sure what else to say here. You can't expect to use the
language to it's fullest without understanding these features.
It's like trying to use rust with out understanding the borrowing
mechanics. And you can't hide the function signature from people
because it's necessary for people to know what the constraints
for the template arguments are.
There is nothing I can do about this. Who makes these
decisions? Can we change it to something useful?
Also, I think the documentation for functions involving ranges
needs more "for dummies" examples. Too many of those functions
leave the reader not having a clue what to do after calling the
function. I know how that can be fixed.
I wrote that function, it's documentation, and wrote the
examples. In the examples, I clearly show that the function can
be used with normal arrays and the explaination in the docs of
what the function does is drop dead simple to understand.
