auto has its uses, but it's wildly overused, especially in library code
and documentation, and really, really, *really* much so in documentation
examples.
On 05/01/2018 06:09 AM, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Monday, 30 April 2018 at 21:11:07 UTC, Gerald wrote:
I'll freely admit I haven't put a ton of thought into this post
(never a good start), however I'm genuinely curious what people's
feeling are with regards to the auto keyword.
Speaking for myself, I dislike the auto keyword. Some of this is
because I have a preference for static languages and I find auto adds
ambiguity with little benefit. Additionally, I find it annoying that
the phobos documentation relies heavily on auto obscuring return
types and making it a bit more difficult to follow what is happening
which gives me a bad taste for it.
clip
So I'm curious, what's the consensus on auto?
As some have pointed out, it certainly has value. For example, in
functions returning ranges, etc. where you wouldn't want to have to
write out the whole type.
However, as an infrequent D user I admit I prefer to see the actual
type where it is feasible, as I find 'auto' is a barrier to
understanding to someone who isn't familiar with a particular piece of
code. I would never use auto in place of a basic type.