On Sunday, 25 September 2016 at 04:06:41 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Considering that a random access range is essentially an
abstraction for a dynamic array and that ranges were designed
with that in mind, I don't know how you can argue that dynamic
arrays shouldn't be treated as ranges.
The auto-decoding is certainly an issue, but that only affects
ranges of char and wchar. The vast majority of dynamic arrays
are perfectly normal ranges.
- Jonathan M Davis
Phobos' range facilities vomit when you try to deal with static
arrays, and they have to be coerced into dynamic arrays before
they can be dealt with. This is silly.
It gets under my skin that length and opIndex and opSlice produce
different results in phobos' ranges depending on one's current
position in the range. This doesn't make sense to me, and the
only reason I can conceive of it having become how ranges work
throughout phobos is because that's how dynamic arrays work if
you force them to act as though they were ranges.
In every single other language I've used, the concept of an
Iterable and an Iterator are distinct and very separate. An
Iterator is something that can be iterated over; an Iterable is
something which can produce an Iterator for iterating over its
contents. In D, arrays are Iterables, and phobos endeavors to
force them to be Iterators as well. It defies years of basic
design wisdom regarding how to differentiate a collection and the
means by which one enumerates the items in that collection.
Arrays are Iterables which should be able to produce an Iterator,
in D's case a range. They should not themselves be Iterators.
"Poisoned m&ms are certainly an issue, but that only affects
people who unwittingly eat them. You see, the vast majority of
m&ms are perfectly innocuous."
